Gene’s expression and methylation status of ZBTB2 and TRAF6 in Non-small cell lung cancer patients

Background: The uncontrolled proliferation of cells in the lung tissue leads to lung cancer. There are several forms of this type of cancer that each has its own symptoms. One of the major types of lung cancer is NSCLC that accounting for 85% of this cancer.  Various factors including epigenetic alteration play a role in the incidence of lung cancer that DNA methylation is one of the most important of them. Studies have shown that methylation changes in the promoter region of genes may occur in the early stages of lung cancer. Therefore in this paper, the expression levels and status of methylation of ZBTB2 and TRAF6 genes were checked in the NSCLC tissue.                  Methods: The expression levels and methylation status of ZBTB2 and TRAF6 genes were investigated in 30 patients with NSCLC tissue and 30 adjacent normal tissues, so that the expression level was performed by use of Real Time-PCR method and methylation status was conducted using methylation specific-High resolution melting (MS-HRM) method.Results: The results of both genes showed that there was no significant difference between the expression levels of tumor samples compared to adjacent normal samples (P>0.05). Also, the results of the methylation status showed that the ZBTB2 gene was methylated in 2 samples of 30 tumor samples and the TRAF6 gene was methylated  in one sample of 30 tumor samples. So wasnt found significant difference in methylation status of two genes in the samples (P>0.05). However, further investigations are required to confirm our findings because this study was designed as a pilot study.