title: STR typing of ductal adenocarcinomas of the pancreas and healthy control tissue in 18 individuals.
abstract: Recently, different work groups have demonstrated that short tandem repeat (STR) typing of various tumor tissues may lead to erroneous results due to tumor microsatellite instability (MSI). This may have considerable implications for genetic profiling of tumor tissue, e.g. in paternity testing or sample individualization. To elucidate whether this is true for ductal adenocarcinomas (DAC) of the pancreas, we genetically investigated tumor and corresponding healthy tissue from 18 patients using a commercially available multiplex PCR kit commonly used in forensic laboratories. STR typing of the samples revealed no differences between tumor and healthy tissue in 17 out of 18 samples. One sample, however, showed an allele expansion at locus D21S11. In heterozygous cases, peak heights varied strongly at different loci, mocking a loss of heterozygozity. This investigation shows that even though tetranucleotide MSI in pancreatic DAC is a rare event, the interpretation of genetic profiles obtained from cancerous samples can be difficult and lead to misinterpretations.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Legal Medicine, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, 24105 Kiel, Germany. tschwark@anat.uni-kiel.de
authors.forename: Thorsten
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Schwark
authors.forename: Christel
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bachmann
authors.forename: Nicole
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: von Wurmb-Schwark
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000483:Alleles; D021441:Carcinoma, Pancreatic Ductal / Q000235:genetics*; D006801:Humans; D019656:Loss of Heterozygosity; D008297:Male; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats; D008875:Middle Aged; D010190:Pancreatic Neoplasms / Q000235:genetics*; D020080:Tandem Repeat Sequences