Expression patterns of sense-antisense transcripts in normal and cancer tissues

We characterized the expression patterns of sense-antisense transcripts, based on available cDNA sequences, in colon (colorectal) cancer tissues and in normal tissues surrounding the cancer tissues. Although expression balances (ratios) of most of sense and antisense transcript pairs did not change between patients or between normal and cancer tissues, we found 68 sense-antisense transcripts whose expression balances were altered specifically in colon cancer tissues. We conducted DNA microarray analyses by using the same set of probes designed for 2621 sense-antisense pairs to detect transcripts expressed in colon cancer tissues. These probes comprise 2358 pairs for the detection of protein-coding transcripts only, 250 pairs for the detection of protein-coding transcripts paired with non-protein-coding transcripts, and 13 pairs for the detection of non-protein-coding transcripts only.