RegIV expression showing specificity to gastrointestinal tract and its potential role in diagnosing digestive tract neuroendocrine tumor.

Regenerating gene IV (RegIV), a member of the regenerating gene family discovered in 2001, has been found to be involved in malignancy in several different organs including the stomach, colorectum, pancreas and prostate, but the overall expression profile of RegIV has not been reported. To learn more about RegIV, we evaluated its distribution by immunohistochemistry (IHC) in a total of 360 samples including 24 types of normal tissue, 40 benign and malignant lesions, and 18 neuroendocrine tumors. We found that in normal tissues, in addition to its relative specificity for the gastrointestinal tract, RegIV was detected in the adrenal gland and mammary gland.

IGFBP7 plays a potential tumor suppressor role against colorectal carcinogenesis with its expression associated with DNA hypomethylation of exon 1.

Insulin-like growth factor binding-protein-7 (IGFBP7) was obtained from our previous colonic adenocarcinoma (CRC) and normal mucosa suppression subtraction hybridization (SSH) cDNA libraries. By RT-PCR and immunohistochemistry, we found that IGFBP7 was overexpressed in CRC tissue compared to normal tissue. However, our in vitro experiments performed in 10 CRC cell lines showed that IGFBP7 expressed only in SW480 and Caco2 cell lines, which implied an underlying reversible regulatory mechanism.

Identification of a novel VNTR polymorphism in C6orf37 and its association with colorectal cancer risk in Chinese population.

Background: C6orf37 was a gene up-regulated in colorectal adenoma in our previous study. A variable region of C6orf37 sequence was found when we blasted its full sequence with NCBI nucleotide database.

Methods: RT-PCR and sequencing were conducted to identify the variable region of C6orf37 as VNTR.

[The correlation between polymorphisms of matrix metalloproteinase-2 and -9 genes and colorectal cancer of Chinese patients].

Objective: To investigate whether the polymorphisms of matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2) and -9 (MMP-9) promoters contribute to the development and progression of colorectal cancer in Chinese population.

Methods: the PCR-based denaturing high-performance liquid chromatography or PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism technique respectively was applied to analyze the MMP-2 -1306C/T and MMP-9 -1562C/T polymorphisms in normal group (126 individuals) and colorectal cancer group (126 cases). Genotype frequencies were compared between patients and matched controls, and the association of genotypes with clinical-pathological parameters was studied.