Aberrant FHIT transcripts in cancerous and corresponding non-cancerous lesions of the digestive tract

✍ Scribed by Yi-Jen Chen; Pao-Huei Chen; Meng-Dar Lee; Jan-Gowth Chang

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: French
• Weight: 119 KB
• Volume: 72
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0020-7136
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-0215(19970917)72:6<955::aid-ijc6>3.0.co;2-o

✦ Synopsis

The FHIT gene was recently discovered and proposed as a tumor-suppressor gene. We examined the FHIT gene in a panel of digestive-tract cancers along with their corresponding non-tumorous tissues by reverse transcription of FHIT mRNA followed by PCR amplification and sequencing of the products. A normal FHIT transcript was found to be expressed at robust levels in 44 of 46 cancerous tissues and in all of 46 non-cancerous tissues tested. Of the 46 cancerous specimens, 21 (45.7%) revealed the occurrence of aberrant transcripts. In addition, of the 46 matched normal tissues, 14 (30.4%) showed the existence of aberrant transcripts. Sequence analysis confirmed that aberrant transcripts were missing in one or more exons of the FHIT cDNA, while 8 cases displayed aberrant transcripts of the FHIT gene both in cancerous and in non-cancerous tissues. However, sequence analysis revealed that the patterns of the aberrant transcripts were different between the corresponding paired samples. In addition, there were 6 cases displaying aberrant FHIT transcripts only in their normal-tissue counterparts. These studies indicate that abnormalities of the FHIT gene transcripts occur at a fairly high frequency in cancerous and corresponding non-cancerous lesions of the digestive tract. However, they might not be causally related to the tumorigenesis of the digestive tract.