Over-expression of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase in human endometrial cancer.
Gynecologic cancers including cancers of the endometrium are a clinical problem (1-4). We mined published microarray data (5, 6) to discover genes associated with endometrial cancers by comparing transcriptomes of the normal endometrium and endometrial tumors from humans. We identified glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, encoded by GAPDH, as among the most differentially expressed genes, transcriptome-wide, in cancers of the endometrium. GAPDH was expressed at significantly higher levels in endometrial tumor tissues as compared to the endometrium. Importantly, in human endometrial cancer, primary tumor expression of GAPDH was correlated with recurrence-free survival in white patients with low mutational burden. GAPDH may be a molecule of interest in understanding the etiology or progression of human endometrial cancer. These data argue that GAPDH should not be utilized as an internal reference or normalization gene for quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction measurement of target depletion in loss-of-function genetic analyses in human endometrial cancer.