Honors- Breast Cancer Article

link to the article!


My honors article for this week is about how gene expression variations is a role in susceptibility to disease, and particularly breast cancer. People heterozygous to certain alleles could be used as a new way to look at susceptibility to breast cancer. For this research experiment they looked at the different allelic expression of 12 different genes that are possibly related to breast cancer susceptibility in both breast tissue and in fresh blood. The results were that most of the allele expressions were comparable between breast tissue and blood. The results point to the use of allelic expression in blood as a replacement for breast tissue.

It was very interesting to read about this topic for my article since this is what we have been learning about in biology class. Everything in this paper really clicked and the results made sense. I think this article is relevant to breast cancer research because the article mentioned how hard it was to get live breast tissue to sample. Fresh blood would be a lot easier to obtain and maybe will be used to look at peoples genetic risk in more detail. While we still work on finding a cure, knowing your genetic risk could be beneficial to patients and doctors to make sure that if cancer does appear, it could be eliminated even sooner. These alleles could even be used to figure out how breast cancer is caused and even lead to a cure.