INTRODUCTION AND DISCUSSION: Molecular genetic investigations relating to thyroid cancer have started to gain clinical importance, with discovery of the tumor-specific oncogenes PTC 1-3 in papillary thyroid cancer and the syndrome-specific mutations of the RET protooncogene in MEN-2a, MEN-2b and familial MTC patients.
In MEN-2, germinal mutations of the C-RET proto-oncogene which is localized on chromosome 10q11 have been found in the three clinical and allelic forms of the syndrome respectively, MEN-2 type A, B and familial isolated MTC.
DGGE--which requires no radioactive, fluorescent, or chemiluminescent labeling--is ideally suited to the diagnosis of MEN 2 because of the syndrome's dominant genetics and the rarity of clinically silent variants in the RET gene.