Defining the gene expression signature of rhabdomyosarcoma by meta-analysis.docVIP

BMC Genomics BioMedCentral Research article Open Access Defining the gene expression signature of rhabdomyosarcoma by meta-analysis Chiara Romualdi1, Cristiano De Pittà1, Lucia Tombolan1, Stefania Bortoluzzi2, Francesca Sartori3, Angelo Rosolen3 and Gerolamo Lanfranchi*1 Address: 1CRIBI Biotechnology Centre and Biology Department, University of Padova, Padova, Italy, 2Biology Department, University of Padova, Padova, Italy and 3Clinica di Oncoematologia Pediatrica, Azienda Ospedaliera-University of Padova, Padova, Italy Email: Chiara Romualdi - chiara.romualdi@unipd.it; Cristiano De Pittà - crisdep@cribi.unipd.it; Lucia Tombolan - lucia@cribi.unipd.it; Stefania Bortoluzzi - stefibo@bio.unipd.it; Francesca Sartori - francesca.sartori@unipd.it; Angelo Rosolen - angelo.rosolen@unipd.it; Gerolamo Lanfranchi* - lanfra@cribi.unipd.it * Corresponding author Published: 07 November 2006 Received: 04 July 2006 Accepted: 07 November 2006 BMC Genomics 2006, 7:287 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-7-287 This article is available from: /1471-2164/7/287 ? 2006 Romualdi 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: Rhabdomyosarcoma is a highly malignant soft tissue sarcoma in childhood and arises as a consequence of regulatory disruption of the growth and differentiation pathways of myogenic precursor cells. The pathogenic pathways involved in this tumor are mostly unknown and therefore a better characterization of RMS gene expression profile would represent a considerable advance. The availability of publicly available gene expression datasets have opened up new challenges especially for the integration of data generated by different research groups and different array platforms with the purpose of