[Representational difference analysis (RDA): finding the genetic lesions in cancer DNA].

RDA is an efficient approach to the identification of the differences between complex genomes and could be valuable as the first step for the positional cloning of genes of interest. RDA is a method of DNA subtraction, which compares representation of the whole genome produced by whole genomic PCR. It can be used for the detection of genetic lesions in cancer, discovery of unknown pathogens, isolation of polymorphic markers linked to a trait and so on. We successfully applied RDA to identify the chromosomal deletion in cancer DNA. Homozygous deletions have been found in the cervical, renal and gastric carcinoma, demonstrating that RDA is an efficient method to identify the possible location of a tumor suppresser gene.