RESUMO
BACKGROUND: Ovarian cancer is the number one killer among all the gynecological cancers. We undertook association study to identify potential alterations in the genomic DNA of a DNA repair gene, DNA polymerase beta (polß), involved in base excision repair (BER), in ovarian carcinomas of patients from Haldia, India. Mutations, splice variants have been reported earlier in different tumors other than ovarian tumors. AIM: In this study we explored the possibility of association of any mutation of pol beta (Exon 8) with prognosis in 152 ovarian cancer samples. RESULTS: Alteration in the exon 8 region (Exon 8:468, AgC; 15.1%) was noted among fifty seven polymorphism positive samples. Alteration in the intervening sequence 8 (IVS8, -25, AgC; 3.9%) was also noted. All alterations are heterozygous in nature. CONCLUSIONS: We found no significant association among the samples from serous type, stage IV, and the polß mutations (P ≤ 0.01). Only a slight tendency of association was evident between IVS8, -25, A to C; and stage III. Further analysis with a larger number of samples is needed.