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INTRODUCTION

Heparocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common forms of human cancer. It is prevalent in Asia where hepatitis B (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections are rampant. In order to control HCC in the future, we need to understand more about the alternation of human liver gene expression profile during the progression of HCC. The advancement of technologies such as gene mapping/sequencing and the initiation of the human genome project in 1990 as well as the expressed sequence tag (EST) sequencing effort lanuched by Merck/Washington University in 1994 have completely changed the landscape of disease gene discovery.

In Taiwan, two different approaches are undergoing to investigate genetic alternations of HCC. One is employing the lost of heterozygosity (LOH) and comparative genome hybridization (CGH) analysis to identify disease locus and to start genomic sequencing of these HCC associated loci. The other one is to establish an EST database on human liver which is still not available in public domain. In this approach, seven human liver cDNA libraries were prepared from one normal adult liver tissue and three paired hepatoma tissues. Total 5,615 sequences were collected from these libraries. We then combined our EST sequence with 128,162 liver related EST sequences from NCBI UniGene database (see library description page for detail), and divided them into five classes: fetal liver, normal adult liver, hepatoma adjacent normal liver, hepatoma tissue and cultured human hepatoma cell line. All of these 133,777 EST sequences were used to search the UniGene Build #79 and Genbank (version on date 1999.05.16 ) by the NCBI blast software version 2.0. After organizing these blast results, we created two electronic differential display profile tables using UniGene group ID and Genbank accession number as index, respectively. We hope that these results will provide a preliminary picture of view for liver gene expression fingerprint. We will put these data in the web site: http://lestdb.nhri.org.tw to promote the research on HCC. We welcome any comments or suggestions on our effort.

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