Genome instability is a
hallmark of
cancer, and genome alterations offer insights on the molecular
mechanisms of tumoral progression as well as an information useful for
diagnosis and prognosis. The advent of the array-CGH (Comparative
Genomic Hybridization) technology makes it possible to monitor the DNA
copy number changes on a genomic scale and many projects have been
launched for studying the genome of tumors. Some of them have already
produced results and have made their CGH microarrays publicly available.
The Institut Curie
Bioinformatics Unit is compiling the cancer CGH
array data sets and offers an access to this data through a graphical
user friendly interface also developed by the group:
VAMP (
Visualization and
Analysis of CGH array, transcriptome and other
Molecular
Profiles) (La Rosa et al., 2006).
These CGH arrays have been analysed at
Institut Curie for (i) positionning the array probes onto the last version of the Working Draft (current version is 36.1) (ii) detection of breakpoint using the
GLAD
algorithm (Hupé et al., 2004). When available, the clinical data are also provided.
