CHROMOSOME REGION 8P11-P21 - REFINED MAPPING AND MOLECULAR ALTERATIONS IN BREAST-CANCER

Several genes, most of them unknown, of the short arm of chromosome 8 are involved in malignant diseases. Numerous studies have implicated a portion of the 8p11-p21 region as the location of one or more tumor s uppressor genes involved in a variety of human cancers, including brea st cancer. We and others have reported linkage analyses suggesting the presence of a putative breast cancer susceptibility gene. Furthermore , several oncogenes of the 8p11-p12 region are involved in reciprocal translocations in myeloproliferative and myelodysplastic disorders and in amplification in breast cancer. To facilitate the analysis of the 8p11-p21 region and the cloning of candidate oncogenes and tumor suppr essor genes, a high-resolution physical and transcriptional map was es tablished with 39 yeast artificial chromosomes and 94 markers, includi ng so-called sequence-tagged sites and expressed sequence-tagged sites derived From either known genes or expressed sequence tags correspond ing to unidentified transcripts. In addition, four novel transcripts w ere identified and localized precisely within the map. This transcript ion map provides a detailed description of gene order for the 8p11-p21 region and will be helpful in the identification of candidate genes f or diseases. From this basis, we refined the mapping of two types of m olecular alterations that occur at 8p11-p21 in sporadic breast cancers , i.e., amplification and deletion. (C) 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.