The Well-accepted Notion That Gene Amplification Contributes to Increased Expression Still Remains, After All These Years, a Reasonable but Unproven Assumption

Overview

Journal J Carcinog

Publisher Biomed Central

Date 2016 Jun 15

PMID 27298590

Citations 17

Authors

Yuping Jia

Lichan Chen

Qingwen Jia

Xixi Dou

Ningzhi Xu

Dezhong Joshua Liao

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

"Gene amplification causes overexpression" is a longstanding and well-accepted concept in cancer genetics. However, raking the whole literature, we find only statistical analyses showing a positive correlation between gene copy number and expression level, but do not find convincing experimental corroboration for this notion, for most of the amplified oncogenes in cancers. Since an association does not need to be an actual causal relation, in our opinion, this widespread notion still remains a reasonable but unproven assumption awaiting experimental verification.

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