Bioinformatics Analysis to Identify Cell Adhesion Molecules in Cancer - Adhesion Molecules - page 323

Definition of Terms
Binding motif: A short conserved region in a DNA or protein sequence that acts as a binding
substrate.
Bioinformatics: h e application of statistical, mathematical, and computer methods to
analyze and interpret voluminous data generated from various i elds of biology.
Ligand-binding region: A ligand-binding region of a protein is a region that contains amino
acids that help the protein to physically interact with its binding partner.
Metastasis: h e process by which tumor cells segregate from their place of origin and
migrate to a dif erent place in the same organ or dif erent organ through blood or
lymphatic vessels.
Microarray: A technique used to quantitatively measure the expression of genes in cells or
tissues. h e technique uses certain nucleic acid sequences as probes that are immobilized
on a solid support. h ese probes bind specii c l uorescence-labeled mRNA expressed
in cells or tissues. At er binding, the abundance of bound mRNA is measured as the
intensity of the l uorescence and interpreted as a measure of gene expression.
Organ-specii c metastasis: A process of metastasis whereby cell adhesion molecules cause
migrating tumor cells to preferentially bind to the cell surfaces of specii c organs.
Phage display peptide library: A method to study protein-protein and protein-peptide
interactions using bacteriophages that are genetically engineered to display the entire
protein or peptides to proteins of interest.
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