72. An Arrayed BAC Resource for the High Resolution Mapping of Cancer-Related Chromosome Aberrations 

Eunpyo Moon¹, Jonghyeob Lee¹, Mei Wang, Bum-Chan Park, Ken Myambo², Colin Collins², Melvin Simon, Ung-Jin Kim 
¹Ajou University, Suwon, Korea 
² Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 
simonm@cco.caltech.edu 

Numerous human chromosomal aberrations known to be related to cancer phenotypes have been catalogued to date. 27,000 such aberrations have been documented and mapped to chromosomal subregions at the resolution of cytobanding technologies. Mapping and characterizing these aberrations at high resolution will provide clues to the underlying molecular nature of many of these cancers. 

We are currently establishing a BAC resource that will cover the known cancer-related regions. The resource will also include 2-3,000 BACs spread over the genome. These BACs are being identified by cDNA inserts or OVERGO probes designed from published ESTs that have been well annotated and mapped to genomic locations. To date, over 200 cDNA probes have been selected from I.M.A.G.E. cDNA library and used for screening against the approved Caltech Human BAC library D. A total of 800 BACs have been selected by these probes and have been deconvoluted against the individual probes. Numerous OVERGOes are being designed and are used for library screening. The resulting BAC resource will provide a roughly 1 Mb resolution BAC array and will serve as a framework for high resolution FISH mapping of the chromosome aberrations. The BACs and BAC contigs from the array will also be used for the identification of the culprit genes, the molecular basis of the cancers incurred by the aberrations, and for the development of the "oncochip" to be used for efficient diagnosis of chromosome aberrations by the use of Comparative Genome Hybridization (CGH) technique.