Clinical significance of gene signature generated from the grade of tumor budding in colorectal cancer

Tumor budding is a definite prognostic marker, but does not always show favorable reproducibility. We developed a new molecular signature related to tumor budding levels, a microscopic finding of dedifferentiation, using RNA extracted from the whole tissue section and disclosed its relevance to a high recurrence risk using an inhouse dataset and independent public datasets. mRNA from 85 primary colorectal tumour samples were extracted and hybridized to HG-U133Plus 2.0 expression arrays. For three samples, the cancer areas at the invasive front of the tumor and the tumor center were dissected and subjected to DNA microarray measurement Each data was normalized with Microarray Suite (MAS) 5.0.