Investigate the Link Between the hMLH1 Gene and Microsatellite Instability in Colorectal Carcinoma
Colorectal carcinoma is one of the most common cancers in the world, with the primary causal factor being genomic instability. Microsatellite Instability is an indicator of an increased tendency of genome alterations which may be caused by defective mismatch repair pathway. hMLH1, is a critical mismatch repair pathways gene known to be mutated in Colorectal Carcinoma. Aim of the study was to better understand the relationship between hMLH1 and Microsatellite Instability in Colorectal Carcinoma using publicly available datasets. An in silco study was performed using a dataset retrieved from cBioportal and the Cancer genome atlas. The results demonstrated that low hMLH1 expression had significantly higher MSI as expected. However, it interestingly showed an inverse association between hMLH1 and fraction of genome alterations. This possibly highlights the complexity of the link between hMLH1 and Microsatellite Instability.