Expression of genes coding for G protein-coupled inwardly-rectifying potassium channels (GIRKs) in breast cancer

Abstract

Background Among the many molecular players in cancer, G-protein coupled receptors have recently been identified to play an important role in the process of cancer progression and metastasis. GIRK1 protein, known for being overexpressed in breast cancer tissue, and a high GIRK1 mRNA expression have been shown to correlate with lymph node metastases in studies with small patient numbers. The aim of this study was to validate these findings by analyzing GIRK1 mRNA expression using large breast cancer patient sets. Methods The GIRK1 mRNA expression levels of 914 invasive breast carcinoma samples available at TCGA were downloaded from the cBio portal with the corresponding clinical data from the UCSC Cancer Genomics Browser. In addition, mRNA expression levels of 105 healthy tissue samples corresponding to 105 of the patients mentioned above were downloaded from the TCGA Data Portal. The mRNA data and the clinical data were combined in Microsoft Excel 2010® and the further analysis was performed in SigmaPlot v12.5®. Results Analysis of the TCGA data showed that GIRK1 is significantly overexpressed in breast cancer compared to normal tissue (p

Date of Award	2014
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Medical University Graz
Supervisor	Wolfgang Schreibmayer (Supervisor) & Thomas Bauernhofer (Co-supervisor)