15. Differential display analysis on human glioblastoma

Gliomas are the most common primary brain tumors and represent more than 40% of all central nervous system (CNS) neoplasms. A wide variety of clinico-pamological entities and morphological variants of neoplastic transformed glial cells are described. This fact causes problems in classification. A recently described molecular technique known as Differential Display (DD) allows the identification of differently expressed genes in various cell types under defined physiological conditions or in different developmental stages. In particular, we propose this technique to define grade-specific molecular markers of the glioblastoma. Tumor fragments representative of 22 cases (10 of high; 7 of low and moderate grade; 3 of other CNS tumors and a nontumorigenic brain tissue as control) where processed in order to extract their RNA contents; these will be reverse-transcribed and subjected to PCR amplifications in presence of a set of arbitrary primers. Preliminar test on this samples has recently revealed some electrophoretic variation. The future target of this study will be the identification of genes differently expressed in low and high grade malignant glioma tissues.