title: Identification of a putative transcriptome signature common to neuroblastoma and neural crest cells.
abstract: Neuroblastoma, the most common extracranial tumor in children, is caused by genetic lesions in neural crest precursors of the peripheral nervous system. However, since neural crest cells are neither present after birth and nor are they readily accessible for analysis, very little is known about the genetic networks they might share with neuroblastoma cells during their development, despite their common embryonic origin. Here we have developed a novel resource for lineage tracing and for the isolation of neural crest cells in the chick embryo, enabling us to perform a genome-wide expression screen in neural crest progenitors. In this analysis, we efficiently retrieved known neural crest specific genes that validate our screening strategy and we identified new genes that participate in diverse cell activities, yet with a strong representation of genes associated to cell signaling and cell mobility, two hallmarks of migratory cells. We crossed this transcriptome data with that in the neuroblastoma gene server to search for the human orthologues of these genes associated with neuroblastoma. Accordingly, we retrieved 54 genes expressed strongly in both populations, from which we were able to validate a total of 27 genes expressed in the neural crest that are relevant to neuroblastoma formation. We propose that neural crest and neuroblastoma tumor cells share a common genetic signature that might serve to characterize neuroblastoma cancer stem cells, thereby contributing to the identification of specific targets against which new therapeutic strategies can be designed.
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Biología Molecular de Barcelona, CSIC, Parc Científic de Barcelona, C/Baldiri i Reixac 20, Barcelona, 08028, Spain.
authors.forename: M Angeles
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Rabadán
authors.forename: Susana
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Usieto
authors.forename: Cinzia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Lavarino
authors.forename: Elisa
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Martí
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002642:Chick Embryo; D005434:Flow Cytometry; D006801:Humans; D007150:Immunohistochemistry; D017403:In Situ Hybridization; D009432:Neural Crest / Q000166:cytology*; D009447:Neuroblastoma / Q000235:genetics*; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis; D059467:Transcriptome
keywords: cancer stem cells; chick embryo; molecular signature; neural crest; neural tube; neuroblastoma