Identification of renal-cell-carcinoma-related cDNA clones by suppression subtractive hybridization

Abstract

The identification of human genes expressed exclusively or preferentially in tumour tissue will be of interest for exploiting the process of oncogenesis, for diagnostic purposes and possibly for developing new strategies in cancer immunotherapy. In an attempt to identify genes differentially expressed in renal cell carcinoma we used the method of suppression subtractive hybridization, comparing renal cell carcinoma tissue with non-transformed kidney tissue. From randomly selected clones, nine were identified to be differentially expressed in renal cell carcinoma. Sequence analysis of seven out of the nine revealed substantial homologies with known genes, the remaining two cDNA clones did not match with any sequences in the GenBank/EMBL database, indicating that they may be novel genes. Notably, expression of five out of the seven known genes is associated with the malignant phenotype. Thus, suppression subtractive hybridization is an effective technique of high sensitivity for the detection of differentially expressed transcripts, not only in cell lines but also for tumour tissue.