Positional Cloning of Tumor Suppressors in Endometrial, Esophageal, Breast, and Lung Cancers, and Neuroblastoma

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Loss of genetic material is the most frequent genetic alteration observed in several kinds of tumors. It has been proposed that human chromosomal region 11q22-23 contains a tumor suppressor gene (or genes) whose deletion has been associated with sporadic cancers of the endometrium, esophagus, breast, lung and neuroblastoma. In order to analyze the genomic structure of this region and isolate a candidate tumor suppressor gene, we developed a complete Not I restriction map of 11q and constructed bacterial clone contig maps of 11q23 using P1, BAC and PAC. Using these maps, we have defined minimal regions of loss of heterozygosity (LOH) in these cancers, and have been constructing transcript maps of these regions to identify candidate tumor suppressor genes.