Abstract
A cure for adrenocortical cancer remains elusive despite rapid advances in the molecular understanding of many biological processes underlying the function of these steroid-producing cells. With the promise of state-of-the-art molecular technologies and the tools provided by the human genome project, a number of investigators are trying to identify molecular targets of adrenocortical tumorigenesis. One path in this endeavor was the identification by positional cloning of genes that are mutated in rare adrenocortical tumors. The subject of this chapter is an updated summary of the results of experiments in the second path that was followed by us and others: that of using genome-wide expression analysis of adrenocortical cells in normal and various disease states. Transcriptomic analysis is a rapidly evolving technology; one would think that the data would be hard to summarize in a chapter that will be quickly outdated. However, there are a limited number of such studies of the adrenal cortex, and their results are surprisingly reproducible. This chapter summarizes all that has been published so far on this subject and points out the most important genes and molecular pathways that have been identified in both normal and diseased adrenal cortex.
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Horvath, A., Stratakis, C.A. (2008). Gene Expression Analysis of the Adrenal Cortex in Health and Disease. In: Handwerger, S., Aronow, B. (eds) Genomics in Endocrinology. Contemporary Endocrinology. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59745-309-7_7
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