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Friday, October 5, 2007

Molecular methods /assays for study of (tumour) microenvironment / niche - part - 1



- illustrations of isolation and characterization of each cell type comprising normal and cancerous breast tissue: ->Please refer the above picture<-


- stroma specific genes, stromal component of breast tumours, Gene expression profiling, determination of stromal signatures, confirm, localize, observations of the expression of solitary fibrous tumour (SFT) and desmoid- type fibromatosis (DTF) specific genes, etc: gene microarray / tissue microarray (TMA)

-key genes associated with a specific disease (Roche???*!!!): cantilever-array (label free and amplification free)

-study of signalling in microenvironments, for manipulating the
behaviour of embryonic stem cells:
synthesized biomaterial microarrays (Anderson et al, 2004) and ECM microarrays (Flaim et al, 2005) Additional platforms or small molecules (Bailey et al, 2004) in cell-based assays.

-proteomic profiling of the cancer microenvironment: antibody arrays

-study of micrometastasis: q-RT-PCR, as well as cellular imaging techniques, such as brighter and dual-fluorescence cell markers, inorganic labels that do not photo-bleach and longitudinal single cell imaging by MRI,

-circulating tumour cells (CTS): laser scanning cytometry with a multimarker real-time RT-PCR assay, immunomagnetic enrichment and fluorescent immunocytochemical characterization (an automated FDA approved system, CellSearch™, etc)


-study the cell fusion (HSCs and local stem-cell niche): Staining: staining cells expressing both the donor’s double marker (EGFP and beta-gal) and the recipients Y chromosome.

-reveal and analyse the cellular complexity: Living –cell micro array (by R&D Molecular cytomics),

-for stem-cell behaviour: labelling in animal studies: retroviral transduction with a market gene or labelling with thymidine or bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU)

-clinical detection of stem-cells: magnetic labelling and in vivo tracking of bone marrow cells by the use of magnetodentrimers or radioactive detection methods

-for assessment of time course of proliferation of stem-cells: generally using reporter gene: LecZ, by identification of galactosidase positive cells in tissue sections and the chromosome analysis by FISH (fluorescent insitu hybridisation),

-for separate different cell populations in cancer stroma expression: flow cytometry,

-to generate gene expression profiles of different components of the tumour microenvironment, including neoplastic and stromal cell types: SAGE (serial analysis of gene expression),


-epithelial–stromal interactions during mammary gland development: mouse model (paper to read: Review: Mouse models of breast cancer metastasis
By Anna Fantozzi and Gerhard Christofor). any other techniques?

-study of tumour microenvironment and drug resistance in hematologic malignancies (or study of environment mediated-drug resistance (EM-DR)): Stromal model using transwell (for reference: Tumour microenvironment and drug resistance in hematologic malignancies by Zhi-Wei Li etal. There is an illustration too)

- illustrations of isolation and characterization of each cell type comprising normal and cancerous breast tissue: ( here i will up-date the picture soon from library)

->Please refer the picture<-








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