Dicarbonyl/L-xylulose reductase: a potential biomarker identified by laser-capture microdissection-micro serial analysis of gene expression of human prostate adenocarcinoma.

To identify genes involved in prostate carcinogenesis, we used laser-capture microdissection-micro serial analysis of gene expression to construct libraries of paired cancer and normal cells from human tissue samples. After computational comparison of the two libraries, we identified dicarbonyl/l-xylulose reductase (DCXR), an enzyme that catalyzes alpha-dicarbonyl and l-xylulose, as being significantly up-regulated in prostate cancer cells. The specificity of DCXR up-regulation for prostate cancer tissues was confirmed by quantitative real-time reverse transcriptase-PCR, virtual Northern blot, and Western blot analyses. Furthermore, DCXR expression at the protein level was assessed using fresh-frozen tissues and a tissue microarray consisting of 46 cases of organ-confined early-stage prostate cancer and 29 cases of chemohormonally treated prostate cancer. In most normal prostate epithelial cells, DCXR was expressed at low levels and was localized predominantly in the cytoplasmic membrane. In contrast, in virtually all grades of early-stage prostate cancer and in all chemohormonally treated cases, DCXR was strikingly overexpressed and was localized predominantly in the cytoplasm and nucleus. In all samples, the stromal cells were completely devoid of DCXR expression. Based on these findings, we suggest that DCXR overexpression has the potential to be an additional useful biomarker for prostate cancer.