11 Neuroblastoma cell lines under normoxic and hypoxic conditions

Hypoxia is a low oxygen condition that occurs in the developing tumor mass and that is associated with poor prognosis and resistance to chemo- and radio-therapy. The definition of the hypoxia gene signature is fundamental for the understanding of tumor biology, as in the case of neuroblastoma, the most common pediatric solid tumor. The issue of identifying a significant group of variables in microarray gene expression experiments is particularly difficult due to the typical high dimensional nature of the data and great effort has been spent in the development of feature selection techniques. Our main goal is to define a robust hypoxia gene signature in neuroblastoma cell lines. A set of 11 neuroblastoma cell lines were cultured under normoxic and hypoxic conditions for 18 hours, and their gene expression profiles were measured with Affymetrix GeneChip HG-U133 Plus 2.0. We used the l1-l2 regularization framework in order to select the significant probesets defining hypoxic versus normoxic cell lines. The expression profiles of 11 neuroblastoma cell lines under normoxia vs hypoxia were studied.