Cloning of a novel gene associated with human nasopharyngeal carcinoma

One EST N27741 with high expression in normal adult nasopharynx tissues but low expression in adult poorly differentiated squamous nasopharyngeal carc inoma has been selected out by the high-density cDNA array expression profi ling technique. The differential expression has been confirmed by RT-PCR. O ne novel gene of 1096 bp has been cloned based on this EST. Bioinformatics analysis found that the new gene sequence contains a whole reading frame en coding 256 amino acids. There is a stop codon TAA in front of the 5' end st art codon, and a tailing signal AATAAA and poly A tail at the 3' end. There is no homologous known gene found after searching by blasting this sequenc e to non-redundancy nucleotide database. Therefore it is considered a novel gene related to nasopharyngeal carcinoma.