CGH analysis of adrenocortical tumors

Adrenocortical tumors are common; their prevalence may reach up to 5-7% in pathological series. Most of them are benign and hormonally inactive, however, rare hormone-secreting (aldosterone and cortisol) and malignant forms are associated with significant morbidity and mortality. The prognosis of adrenocortical cancer (ACC) is poor with an overall five-year survival below 30 %. In this study, CGH analysis was performed on 4 ACC (adrenocortical carcinoma), 4 IA (hormonally inactive adrenocortical adenoma) and 3 CPA (cortisol producing adrenocortical adenoma) samples. Tissue digestion, labeling, hybridization and data analysis of genomic DNA were performed according to the Agilent Technologies (Santa Clara, CA) protocol version 2.0 for 105 K arrays. As expected, many of the observed aberrations were generally consistent with those of other preciously published data and will provide the basis for determination how genomic diversity impacts biological function and human diseases, such as cancer. In this study, biopsies from adrenocortical tumors (4 ACC, 4 IA and 3 CPA samples) were analysed with CGH. Tissue digestion, labeling, hybridization, and data analysis of genomic DNA were performed according to the Agilent Technologies (Santa Clara, CA) protocol version 2.0 for 105 K arrays. Slides were scanned with Agilent Microarray scanner and data were extracted with Feature Extraction software version 9.5.1.1. DNA Analytics software was used (version 4.0.85, Agilent Technologies, Santa Clara, CA) for data analysis. The starting and ending points of the aberrations were confirmed by the ADM-2 algorithm with 6.0 threshold.