Relative efficiency of denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis and single strand conformation polymorphism in the detection of mutations in exons 5 to 8 of the p53 gene.

p53 is the most commonly mutated gene in a large variety of human tumors including familial cancers. Because p53 mutations have in a number of human cancer types, been related to a negative outcome of the disease and the importance of pre-symptomatic diagnosis in cancer-prone families, screening for p53 mutations is becoming more and more widely used. In order to avoid sequencing of the complete coding sequence, several pre-screening methods have been developed and applied to the p53 gene. Among them, Single Strand Conformation Polymorphism (SSCP) and Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis (DGGE) appear to be highly sensitive. In this work, we used 52 different p53 variants to compare the two methods. In our conditions, DGGE is more sensitive than SSCP since 100% of the variants were detected. SSCP detected 90% of the variants, but efficiency of the method can still be improved by additional optimization experiments.