p73 at chromosome 1p36.3 is lost in advanced stage neuroblastoma but its mutation is infrequent

p73, a novel p53 family member, is a recently identified candidate neuroblastoma (NBL) suppressor gene mapped at chromosome 1p36.33 and was found to inhibit growth and induce apoptosis in cell lines. To test the hypothesis that p73 is a NBL suppressor gene, we analysed the p73 gene in primary human NBLs. Loss of heterozygosity (LOH) for p73 was observed in 19% (28/151) of informative cases which included 92 mass-screening (MS) tumors. The high frequency of p73 LOH was significantly associated with sporadic NBLs (9% vs 34%, P<0.001), N-myc amplification (10% vs 71%, P<0.001), and advanced stage (14% vs 28%, P<0.05). Both p73alpha and p73beta transcripts were detectable in only 46 of 134 (34%) NBLs at low levels by RT-PCR methods, while they were easily detectable in most breast cancers and colorectal cancers under the same conditions. They found no correlation between p73 LOH and its expression levels (P>0.1). We found two mutations out of 140 NBLs, one somatic and one germline, which result in amino acid substitutions in the C-terminal region of p73 which may affect transactivation functions, though, in the same tumor samples, no mutation of the p53 gene was observed as reported previously. These results suggest that allelic loss of the p73 gene may be a later event in NBL tumorigenesis. However, p73 is infrequently mutated in primary NBLs and may hardly function as a tumor suppressor in a classic Knudson's manner.