This grant will support development of new technology for high throughput analysis of methylation status in CpG islands, which is scalable to total genome characterization. This technology is capable of providing whole genome analysis of one of the earliest known molecular aberrations causally linked to many cancers. Potential commercial applications reach many areas of the cancer market and even the broader pharmaceutical industry including: Diagnosis, Pharmacogenomic technology for improved clinical trials, Personalized Medicine, Gene Discovery and pre-clinical Toxicology. Our specific aim is to demonstrate that an innovative variant of MALDI mass spectrometry, when used with novel new PCR chemistries, is capable of high speed methylation analysis for a pilot set of CpG islands and that the methylation analysis is correlative with disease state. Proof-of-principle in this work will lead to whole genome scale up, where the entire set of CpG islands (reflecting expression state of more than 40,000 genes) may be screened for aberrant methylation status.
Thesaurus Terms: CpG island, DNA methylation, genome, high throughput technology, technology /technique development chromosome aberration matrix assisted laser desorption ionization, polymerase chain reaction
