Gene signature of the post-Chernobyl papillary thyroid cancer. Homo sapiens

Thyroid gland is among the most sensitive organs to ionizing radiation. Whether low-dose radiation-induced papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) differs from sporadic PTC is yet unknown. We used microarrays to identify gene signature of radiation-induced papillary thyroid carcinomas Overall design: To identify molecular differences between radiation-induced (Exposed to Chernobyl Radiation, ECR) and sporadic PTC, we investigated 65 childhood/young adult PTC samples using DNA microarray (Affymetrix, Human Genome U133 2.0 Plus). The PTC samples were from patients born either before (33 ECR cases) or at least 9 months after (32 non-ECR cases) the Chernobyl catastrophe. Multofactoral analyses were performed in order to define some additional factors that could have impact on the gene expression profile. Morover the microarray data were validated with the QPCR reaction and exon arrays.