Document Type

Thesis

Date of Award

5-2016

School/College

College of Science, Engineering, and Technology (COSET)

Degree Name

MS in Biology

Committee Chairperson

Assistant Professor Audrey Player

Abstract

Previous data show that Interleukin 32 gene (IL32) is differentially expressed in luminal compared to triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), and further analysis show that IL32 gene exists as nine transcript splice variants. The initial goal of this study was to determine which of the nine Interleukin 32 (IL32) splice variants is responsible for the differential gene expression observed in luminal compared to TNBC and perform bioinformatics approaches to characterize the splice variants and corresponding proteins. We retrieved nucleotide and protein sequences from the National Cancer Institute's PubMed website (NCBI). These sequences were then analyzed for similarity. We found that the variants were similar on a nucleotide and protein level, so similar that we could not determine if individual splice variants were acting alone. With these similarities, we were able to conclude that a group of the transcript variants are responsible for the differential expression observed in luminal compared to TNBC. We suspect some splice variants contribute more than others and this difference might be based on the presence of deletions found in the splice variants. 1

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