The goal of this work is to study differential gene expression between normal breast epithelial cells and the malignant counterpart using microarray technique. We used GeneAlbum GEM 1 from Incyte Pharmaceuticals, Inc., which contains approximately 10,000 cDNA clones. 4 normal human mammary epithelial cells (HMEC) were used to search different gene expression patterns. In addition, 7 well-established breast cancer cell lines were used as probes against a common normal HMC.
Comparison between normal HMEC and malignant HMEC verified several known HMEC molecular markers, laminin-5 beta 3 and alpha 3, cytokeratins 5, 15 and 17. We also observed some known breast cancer related genes, such as, HER2, HER3, and pS2, etc., were expressed as expected. The differential expression patterns among 4 normal HMEC, which may not be correlated with malignant phenotype, were used to reduce the background, or frequency of false “positive”. In addition, microarray data analyses revealed that novel involvement of genes that are commonly differentially regulated in these breast cancer cells, such as, integrins alpha 3 and 6.
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Liu, S., Wu, Q., Kirschmeier, P. et al. Differential expression of genes in human normal and breast cancer cells determined by microarray technique. Nat Genet 23 (Suppl 3), 59 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/14353
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/14353
