Biotechnological inventions during the 20th century have resulted in a wide range of approaches for explorations in the functional genomics field. Microarray technology is one of the recent advances which have provided us with snapshots of which genes are expressed in cells of various tissues and diseases. Methods to obtain reliable microarray data are continuously being developed and improved to meet the demands of biological researchers. In this thesis microarrays have been used to investigate gene expression patterns in cancer research. Four studies in three different areas were carried out covering adrenocortical tumors, p53 target genes and a comparison of RNA amplification methods. Adrenocortical tumours are among the most common tumours with an incidence of 7-9%. Malignancy of these tumors is rare. Distinction between malignant and benign tumours is often difficult to establish which makes an improvement of diagnostic approaches important. To elucidate biological processes in adrenocortical tumour development and to examine if there is a molecular signature associated with malignancy, microarray analysis was performed on 29 adrenocortical tumors and four normal specimens. It was possible to classify malignant and benign samples based on the entire expression profile. A number of potential biomarkers was identified which will be further evaluated. P53 is a gene which is mutated in 50% of all cancers. Functional p53 is a transcription factor which is activated upon cellular stress and DNA damage. Target genes are mainly involved in cell cycle arrest and apoptosis. In solid tumors cells are stressed by hypoxia. To examine which target genes p53 activate under hypoxic conditions a microarray study of the cell lines HCT116p53+/+ and HCT116p53-/- was performed. A set of novel potential p53 target genes was identified while many known target genes were found to be not transcriptionally activated during hypoxia. Follow up which was focused on how p53 affected hypoxia induced apoptosis showed that the death receptor Fas was critical. When small amounts of tissue are available, amplification of the transcript population is necessary for microarray analysis. A new strategy for amplification based on PCR was evaluated and compared to a commercial in vitro transcription protocol. Both protocols produced reliable results. Advantages with the PCR based method are a lower cost and a high flexibility due to compatibility with both sense and antisense strand microarrays. Keywords: adrenocortical tumour, apoptosis, cancer, classification, gene expression, microarray, p53, RNA amplification / QC 20100907

Regulation of gene expression occupies a central role in the control of the flow of genetic information from genes to proteins. Regulatory events on multiple levels ensure that the majority of the genes are expressed under controlled circumstances to yield temporally controlled, cell and tissue-specific expression patterns. The combined set of expressed RNA transcripts constitutes the transcriptome of a cell, and can be analysed on a large-scale using both sequencing and microarray-based methods. The objective of this work has been to develop tools for analysis of the transcriptomes (methods), and to gain new insights into several aspects of the stem cell transcriptome (applications). During recent years expectations of stem cells as a resource for treatment of various disorders have emerged. The successful use of endogenously stimulated or ex vivo expanded stem cells in the clinic requires an understanding of mechanisms controlling their proliferation and self-renewal. This thesis describes the development of tools that facilitate analysis of minute amounts of stem cells, including RNA amplification methods and generation of a cDNA array enriched for genes expressed in neural stem cells. The results demonstrate that the proposed amplification method faithfully preserves the transcript expression pattern. An analysis of the feasibility of a neurosphere assay (in vitro model system for study of neural stem cells) clearly shows that the culturing induces changes that need to be taken into account in design of future comparative studies. An expressed sequence tag analysis of neural stem cells and their in vivo microenvironment is also presented, providing an unbiased large-scale screening of the neural stem cell transcriptome. In addition, molecular mechanisms underlying the control of stem cell self-renewal are investigated. One study identifies the proto-oncogene Trp53 (p53) as a negative regulator of neural stem cell self-renewal, while a second study identifies genes involved in the maintenance of the hematopoietic stem cell phenotype. To facilitate future analysis of neural stem cells, all microarray data generated is publicly available through the ArrayExpress microarray data repository, and the expressed sequence tag data is available through the GenBank. / QC 20100927