Impact of renal failure on the tumor markers of mesothelioma, N-ERC/mesothelin and osteopontin.

Background: Knowledge of the characteristics and effective use of tumour markers for mesothelioma is essential for early-stage diagnosis of mesothelioma. We examined whether renal dysfunction influences blood concentrations of promising new tumour markers, N-ERC/mesothelin (N-ERC) and osteopontin (OPN), to an important degree.

Patients And Methods: Levels of serum N-ERC and plasma OPN in 32 patients with chronic renal dysfunction, 22 of whom were on hemodialysis (CKD group), and 102 healthy volunteers were measured.

Linkage disequilibrium grouping of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) reflecting haplotype phylogeny for efficient selection of tag SNPs.

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been proposed to be grouped into haplotype blocks harboring a limited number of haplotypes. Within each block, the portion of haplotypes is expected to be tagged by a selected subset of SNPs; however, none of the proposed selection algorithms have been definitive. To address this issue, we developed a tag SNP selection algorithm based on grouping of SNPs by the linkage disequilibrium (LD) coefficient r(2) and examined five genes in three ethnic populations--the Japanese, African Americans, and Caucasians.