www.clinicalomics.com May/June 2017 Clinical OMICs 23
He explained: "We know that they regulate the expression
level of the gene. What we don't know is exactly how do
they work? Are they always together for example? Do they
come together once in a while? Are they coming together
just once in a week or once in a day? How dynamically are
they interacting with each other? We don't get this kind
of information from this population analysis, but when
we label with multicolor then we can study this dynamic
information."
While this type of fluorescent labeling technique has wider
implications, it could be a useful tool for cancer researchers.
"What we think it will allow us to do in cancer cells is
that we can compare a malignant cell to a normal cell in
terms of the location of the particular gene, in terms of how
dynamically this particular gene is moving around inside
the nucleus," said Dr. Adli.
"Then, if you do the multicolor labeling, we can look at
regulatory enhancer elements. For example, we can label
them to see that in normal cells an enhancer element is not
interacting with a specific gene, but in cancer cells this ele-
ment does interact with this gene."
Dr. Adli believes it is too early to predict if this technique
could be used to help develop cancer therapies, but sug-
gests it could be useful for diagnostic purposes.
"In cancers there is copy number variation where one
gene is duplicated many, many times so we end up with
multiple copies of the same gene. We could simply use our
technique to see how many copies of a gene are there in a
cell," he explained.
"In normal cells we should have two copies, one from
Mum, one from Dad, so we should see two dots. But in can-
cer cells, when there is amplification of a genomic region we
should see many dots."
The lab's team includes (left to right) Mazhar Adli, Tom Wei, Jackie Yang,
Stephen Shang, and Turan Tufan.
UVA
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