Comparative analysis of cancer genes in the human and chimpanzee genomes.docVIP

BMC Genomics BioMedCentral Research article Open Access Comparative analysis of cancer genes in the human and chimpanzee genomes Xose S Puente*1, Gloria Velasco1, Ana Gutiérrez-Fernández1, Jaume Bertranpetit2, Mary-Claire King3 and Carlos López-Otín1 Address: 1Departamento de Bioquímica y Biología Molecular, Facultad de Medicina, Instituto Universitario de Oncología, Universidad de Oviedo, 33006-Oviedo, Spain, 2Unitat de Biologia Evolutiva, Departament de Ciencies Experimentals i de la Salut, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain and 3Departments of Medicine and Genome Sciences, School of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle WA-98195, USA Email: Xose S Puente* - xspuente@uniovi.es; Gloria Velasco - gvc@uniovi.es; Ana Gutiérrez-Fernández - anaguti@uniovi.es; Jaume Bertranpetit - jaume.bertranpetit@; Mary-Claire King - mcking@; Carlos López-Otín - clo@uniovi.es * Corresponding author Published: 26 January 2006 Received: 09 November 2005 Accepted: 26 January 2006 BMC Genomics 2006, 7:15 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-7-15 This article is available from: /1471-2164/7/15 ? 2006 Puente et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Cancer is a major medical problem in modern societies. However, the incidence of this disease in non-human primates is very low. To study whether genetic differences between human and chimpanzee could contribute to their distinct cancer susceptibility, we have examined in the chimpanzee genome the orthologous genes of a set of 333 human cancer genes. Results: This analysis has revealed that all examined human cancer genes are present in chimpanzee, contain intact open reading frames and show a high degree of conservation between both species