Sunday, October 18, 2009

Relationship between H pylori and gastric cancer

In my earlier blogs, I have covered lots of news about the Helicobacter pylori, (H. pylori a gram negative bacterium which infects about 50% of the world population). H. pylori colonization causes a strong systemic immune response. Various tools have been employed to identify the relationship between H pylori and gastric cancer, including c-DNA microarrays. However, most of these methods did not consider the systematic interaction of biological components. While reading science daily, I found this interesting info.

A research team from South Korea studied the complex reaction of gastric inflammation induced by H. pylori in a systematic manner using a protein interaction network.

The researchers drew a conclusion that immune-related proteins activated by H. pylori infection interact with proto-oncogene proteins. The hub and bottleneck proteins are potential drug targets for gastric inflammation and cancer.

Their study showed how a systematic approach such as the network construction produces meaningful information. It also offered a relatively easy and simple framework to understand the complexity of cellular interactions having functional importance. Therefore, the application of this tool may be an alternative to find important genes and drug targets in other diseases and in complex biological systems....

Ref : http://www.wjgnet.com/1007-9327/15/4518.asp

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