Analysis of 3'UTR shortening events in breast cancer

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Bilgisayar Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2013

Öğrenci: ONUR BALOĞLU

Danışman: TOLGA CAN

Özet:

Cancer is the collective term used to describe a diverse group of diseases that share certain hallmarks, which in turn enables the affected cells to sustain an uncontrolled cell growth. Despite the increasing efforts and advances in cancer therapies, cancers are still responsible for approximately 10% of all the deaths worldwide. Furthermore, the increase in the average human lifespan will further contribute to the cancer incidences. This brings the necessity to focus our efforts on early detection and effective diagnosis methods. With the advances in high-throughput genomics technologies, gene expression signatures have gained attention as a novel method in cancer diagnostics. These signatures are identified by simply comparing the expression levels of genes in tumor and control samples. Here, we propose an alternative method based on the probe expression level measurement of 3’UTR of candidate genes. We chose breast cancer as a model and performed an in silico analysis on publicly available gene expression datasets of Affymetrix chips to analyse 3’UTR shortening during breast cancer situation. Overall, our analysis suggests that shortening of 3’UTR is a significant mechanism observed in breast cancer .