Pancreatic endocrine tumour (PET)_Affymetrix 500K SNP arrays

To identify genetic alterations involved in the pathogenesis of PETs, we have analysed a total of 32 PET samples (29 tissue specimens and 3 cell lines) using high-resolution single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays. Keywords: comparative genomic hybridisation A total of 29 fresh-frozen PET tissue specimens (all from primary lesions) were obtained surgically in University of Verona, Italy, with ethical approval of the institutions under the Helsinki Declaration. All tumour tissues were diagnosed histologically by a pathologist and confirmed to be occupied with at least 70% of neoplastic cells before involved in this study. Normal pancreatic tissues were available in 20 out of 29 PET samples and used as a reference. Three human PET cell lines (CM; metastatic insulinoma, BON; metastatic carcinoid, QGP-1; somatostatinoma) were also acquired from University of Verona, Italy. Tumour and reference genomic DNAs were extracted using Qiagen DNA extraction kit (Qiagen Ltd., Sussex, UK).