Background: The discovery of differentially expressed genes of colonic adenoma minus normal mucosa enables the understanding of early molecular events in colorectal carcinogenesis. In our previous study, we have developed an adenoma minus normal mucosa suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) library and identified 109 differentially expressed clones.
Methods: An in-house EST pipeline and the Gene Ontology web-based tool () were used to analyze these clones. Realtime quantitative RT-PCR (Q-PCR) was applied to detect the expression of 14-3-3 zeta, REG4 and 6 ribosomal protein genes (RPS2, RPS12, RPS27A, RPL5, RPL7a and RPL10a) in 14 adenomas (8 with concurrent cancers) and 44 colorectal adenocarcinomas with paired normal mucosa.
Results: Sixty-two candidate genes were obtained from this library. Bioinformatics analysis indicated that both ribosomal protein genes and immune-related genes were enriched. REG4 was significantly upregulated in colorectal adenomas (medium fold: 1.676, p<0.05, Wilcoxon test) and 14-3-3 zeta in cancers (medium fold: 1.202, p<0.01, Wilcoxon test), as compared with those of paired normal mucosa. However, all ribosomal protein genes were not significantly overexpressed in colorectal adenomas or cancers.
Conclusions: A differential gene expression profile in A-N SSH library may be helpful in understanding the molecular mechanism of colorectal cancer initiation and progression. REG4 and 14-3-3 zeta may be potential biomarkers for early colorectal cancer detection.