RESEARCH The CRKL gene encoding r

Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleBackground Although the overall incidence of gastric cancer is de-creasing in many countries, the high incidence of gastric cancer remains a serious health problem, and gastric can-cer continues to be the second-leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide [1,2]. Gastric carcinogenesis is a multi-step process in which environmental and genetic factors interact [1–8]. Among the genetic changes observed in cancerous cells, genomic DNA amplification is a well-known alteration that is involved in gastric cancer [4,5,7]. Amplification is often associated with increased expres-sion levels of the genes contained in the amplified loci [5]. Oncogenes in gastric cancer, such as MYC (mapped to chromosome 8q24), KRAS (12p12), and ERBB2 (17q12), are located in such amplified regions [4,5,7,9]. We considered the possibility that there exist genes whose amplification in gastric cancer has not been * Correspondence