Deciphering Proteins Encoded Sequences Of The Genistein Treated Human Prostate Cancer Cells Pc-3 By Cdna Microarrays

Determining the true set of genes involved in apoptosis generated by Genistein into PC-3 human prostate cancer cells has turned out to be much harder problem than we expected; the exact number of genes has gradually decreased since the publication of the draft at the 2005 AACR Annual Meeting (Laslo Ramona et al. 2005). The protein-coding regions of the selected genes are generally agreed upon, but even for these, the precise gene structure, comprising the boundaries of all exons and of the coding sequence, remains less than certain. Evidential support for existing genes varies widely, from tentatively defined to experimentally confirm. For some rarely expressed genes, the ESTs (Expressed Sequence Tags) and to the overlapping but inconsistent predictions of multiple gene finders. For some loci, evidence of expression is absent but evidence of expression is absent but evidence from protein sequence alignments to other species strongly suggests the presence of a gene. To illustrate this challenge we consider an example from our cDNA microarray experiments comparing the human prostate cancer PC3 cells with Genistein treated human prostate cancer PC3 cells.