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N Rampino

Publications and source records attributed to N Rampino.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Somatic frameshift mutations in the BAX gene in colon cancers of the microsatellite mutator phenotype.

Cancers of the microsatellite mutator phenotype (MMP) show exaggerated genomic instability at simple repeat sequences. More than 50 percent (21 out of 41) of human MMP+ colon adenocarcinomas examined were found to have frameshift mutations in a tract of eight deoxyguanosines [(G)8] within BAX, a gene that promotes apoptosis. These mutations were absent in MMP- tumors and were significantly less frequent in (G)8 repeats from other genes. Frameshift mutations were present in both BAX alleles in some MMP+ colon tumor cell lines and in primary tumors. These results suggest that inactivating BAX mutations are selected for during the progression of colorectal MMP+ tumors and that the wild-type BAX gene plays a suppressor role in a p53-independent pathway for colorectal carcinogenesis.

Adenocarcinoma

Nucleic acid fingerprinting by PCR-based methods: applications to problems in aging and mutagenesis.

There are many methods of inference in common use in biology that are based on population sampling, including such diverse areas as sampling organisms to determine the population structure of an ecosystem, sampling a set of DNA sequences to infer evolutionary history, sampling genetic loci to build a genetic map, sampling differentially expressed genes to find phenotypic markers, and many others. Recently developed PCR-based methods for nucleic acid fingerprinting can be used as sampling tools with general applicability in molecular biology, evolution and genetics. These methods include arbitrarily primed PCR (AP-PCR; Welsh and McClelland, 1990) and random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD; Williams et al., 1990) for the fingerprinting of DNA, and RNA arbitrarily primed PCR (RAP-PCR; Welsh et al., 1992a) and differential display (DD; Liang and Pardee, 1992) for the fingerprinting of RNA. Novel ways of looking at genetic control are facilitated by the high data-acquisition capabilities of the fingerprinting methods. In this article, we review some of the applications of DNA fingerprinting to the study of mutagenesis, and of RNA fingerprinting to the study of normal and abnormal signal transduction. We propose that these fingerprinting approaches may also have applications in the study of senescence and aging.

Aging