Fine mapping of the NRC-1 tumor suppressor locus within chromosome 3p12

Identification of tumor suppressor genes based on physical mapping exercises has proven to be a challenging endeavor, due to the difficulty of narrowing regions of loss of heterozygosity (LOH), infrequency of homozygous deletions, and the labor-intensive characterization process for screening candidates in a given genomic interval. We previously defined a chromosome 3p12 tumor suppressor locus NRC-1 (Nonpapillary Renal Carcinoma-1) by functional complementation experiments in which renal cell carcinoma microcell hybrids containing introduced normal chromosome 3p fragments were either suppressed or unsuppressed for tumorigenicity following injection into athymic nude mice. We now present the fine-scale physical mapping of NRC-1 using a QPCR-based approach for measuring copy number at sequence tagged sites (STS) which allowed a sub-exon mapping resolution. Using STS-QPCR and a novel statistical algorithm, the NRC-1 locus was narrowed to 4.615-Mb with the distal boundary mapping within a 38-Kb interval between exon 3 and exon 4 of the DUTT1/Robo1 gene, currently the only candidate tumor suppressor gene in the interval. Further mutational screening and gene expression analyses indicate that DUTT1/ROBO1 is not involved in the tumor suppressor activity of NRC-1, suggesting that there are at least two important tumor suppressor genes within the chromosome 3p12 interval.