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Abstract:
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Cancer is a collection of diseases that affects the lives of many. One of every four Americans alive today will develop cancer and at least one in every five will die from cancer (Prescot et al., 1986). Thus it is very important to learn as much as possible about the modes of action of these diseases.
In this work, we applied molecular biological techniques to study some of the genetic consequences of rat hepatoma cells and human endometrial carcinoma cells. In the first study the transcript levels for hexokinase, a major regulatory enzyme in glycolysis, were measured and compared in tumor and normal samples using Northern and slot blot analysis. This study was performed in response to previous observations by Nakashima and co-workers that there were significant increases in hexokinase activity in AS- 30D hepatoma cells. Our studies indicated that a significant increase of Type I hexokinase transcript did appear in AS-30D rat hepatoma cells.
The second study was an investigation of the alpha-tubulin gene in human normal and tumor endometrial samples by restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis. The goal was to locate a tumor specific biomarker which could serve as a diagnostic marker for endometrial cancer. Previous reports had indicated that an alpha-tubulin polymorphism existed; however, no relationship was observed between the presence of this polymorphism and endometrial cancer. Our work indicated that there was an apparent, yet not fully explainable relationship between the presence of the observed polymorphism and endometrial cancer. |