Contrary to the traditional vision in which only one or just few particular genes are involved in illness genesis and development, this project has a more modern vision: it considers that alterations in modules of genes functionally related are the real responsible for the development of most illness, the alterations considered in this project are the chromosomal copy number alterations.

This project studies chromosomal copy number alterations in Medulloblastoma, a highly malignant primary brain tumor that originates in the cerebellumand, that affects prevalently childhood. Recently “Comparative Genomic Hybridization” (CGH) has been developed as the most modern molecular cytogenetic tehnique allowing the entire genome to be scanned, in a single step, for copy number aberrations in chromosomal material. The purpose of this collaboration is to investigate the correlation between copy number alteration in medulloblastoma tissue and the clinical behaviourof the tumor.