Abstract 4201: Analysis of gene expression profile and signaling networks potentially involved in lymph node metastasis in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is the 8th most common cancer worldwide and the 6th tumor in frequency in Brazil. Most of cases are diagnosed at an advanced stage and despite the improvement of various treatment modalities the overall survival rates still remain low. The aim of this study was to analyze the gene expression profile to identify the genes related to lymph node metastasis in ESCC samples. Genome-wide expression profiling was carried out in total RNA extracted from 17 frozen tissue samples using the Agilent Whole Human Genome Microarray 44K following the manufacturer's protocol. Data were extracted and flagged with Feature Extraction and processed using TMEV Software. A supervised hierarchical clustering was performed using the Pearson distance metric. Paired t-test analysis with 1000 permutations was performed to generate a list of differentially expressed genes from the comparison between the different groups. Only genes showing a false discovery rate (Q value)