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Scientific objectives include uncovering molecular mechanisms underlying genomic instability, aberrant transcription and splicing in tumorigenesis and cancer metastasis. Ongoing studies are focused on genome wide identification and epigenomic analysis of Natural Antisense Transcripts and transcriptionally active retro-transposable repetitive elements in cancer, their potential role in promoting tumor heterogeneity and their value as molecular markers for diagnosis, prognosis and early detection of cancer.

A significant fraction of the research conducted in my laboratory over the past three years has focused on the identification of metastasis fingerprints in chondrosarcomas, and on the development of an animal model for the study of tumor growth and metastasis. This work was initiated in the context of my participation in the Cancer Genome Anatomy Project supported by the National Cancer Institute. Additional projects under development in my laboratory include:Natural Antisense Transcripts in cancer, and investigation of the impact of Alu-retroposition, Alu-alternative splicing and Alu-exonization on the creation (antisenseization) or exclusion (deantisenseization) of sense-antisense bidirectional transcript regions.

II.  Study of molecular mechanisms underlying Alu-mediated genomic instability and its relevance to cancer development, diagnosis and prognosis. 

III. Further development and utilization of technology to expedite ongoing efforts aimed at the identification, cloning and sequencing of human, mouse and rat full-length transcripts for the NIH Brain Molecular Anatomy Project and the NIH Mammalian Gene Collection Program, and to facilitate large-scale gene discovery in other organisms of interest.

Publications:

Wang, D., Huang, J., Xie, H., Manzella, L. and Soares, M.B. (2005). A robust two-way semi-linear model for normalization of cDNA microarray data. BMC Bioinformatics, 6(1): 14.

Zhang, S. S-M., Xu, X., Li, J., Liu, M-G., Zhao, H., Soares, M.B., Barnstable, C.J. and Fu, X-Y. (2005). Comprehensive in silico functional specification of mouse retina transcripts. BMC Genomics 6: 40.

Segal, J. P., Stallings, N.R., Lee, C.E., Zhao, L., Socci, N.D., Viale, A., Harris, T.M., Soares, M.B., Childs, G., Elmquist, J., Parker, K.L. and Friedman, J.M. (2005). Use of laser-capture microdissection for the identification of marker genes for the ventromedial hypothalamic nucleus. Journal of Neuroscience 20 (16): 4181-4188.

McGlinn, E., van Bueren, K.L., Fiorenza, S., Mo, R., Poh, A.M., Forrest, A., Soares, M.B., Bonaldo, M.F., Grimmond, S., Hui, C., Wainwright, B. and Wicking, C. (2005). Pax9 and Jagged1 act downstream of Gli3 in vertebrate limb development. Mechanisms of Development (in press).

Hackett, J.D., Scheetz, T.E., Yoon, H.S., Soares, M.B., Bonaldo, M.F., Casavant, T.L. and Bhattacharya, D. (2005). Insights into a dinoflagellate genome through expressed sequence tag analysis. BMC Genomics 6:80.

View Publications by Marcelo Soares listed in the National Library of Medicine (PubMed).