RELATIVE EFFICIENCY OF DENATURING GRADIENT GEL-ELECTROPHORESIS AND SINGLE-STRAND CONFORMATION POLYMORPHISM IN THE DETECTION OF MUTATIONS INEXON-5 TO EXON-8 OF THE P53 GENE

p53 is the most commonly mutated gene in a large variety of human tumo rs including familial cancers. Because p53 mutations have in a number of human cancer types, been related to a negative outcome of the disea se and the importance of pre-symptomatic diagnosis in cancer-prone fam ilies, screening for p53 mutations is becoming more and more widely us ed. In order to avoid sequencing of the complete coding sequence, seve ral prescreening methods have been developed and applied to the p53 ge ne. Among them, Single Strand Conformation Polymorphism (SSCP) and Den aturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis (DGGE) appear to be highly sensit ive. In this work, we used 52 different p53 variants to compare the tw o methods. In our conditions, DGGE is more sensitive than SSCP since 1 00% of the variants were detected. SSCP detected 90% of the variants, but efficiency of the method can still be improved by additional optim ization experiments.