DNA Copy Number Aberrations in Breast Cancer by Array Comparative Genomic Hybridization

Array comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) has been popularly used for an-alyzing DNA copy number variations in diseases like cancer. In this study, we investigated 82 sporadic samples from 49 breast cancer patients using 1-Mb reso-lution bacterial artificial chromosome CGH arrays. A number of highly frequent genomic aberrations were discovered, which may act as "drivers" of tumor pro-gression. Meanwhile, the genomic profiles of four "normal" breast tissue samples taken at least 2 cm away from the primary tumor sites were also found to have some genomic aberrations that recurred with high frequency in the primary tu-mors, which may have important implications for clinical therapy. Additionally, we performed class comparison and class prediction for various clinicopathological pa-rameters, and a list of characteristic genomic aberrations associated with different clinicopathological phenotypes was compiled. Our study provides clues for further investigations of the underlying mechanisms of breast carcinogenesis.