Peritumoral infiltration is characteristic of astrocy-
tomas even in low-grade tumors. Tumor cells migrate to
neighbouring tissue and cause recurrence. The extracellular
matrix (ECM) plays a role in tumor invasion; expression
levels of its components’ have been linked to tumor invasion.
This study determines the mRNA and protein expression of 20
invasion-related ECM components by examining non-tumor
brain; grade I-II-III astrocytoma and glioblastoma samples.
Expression levels were measured by QRT-PCR and mass-
spectroscopy. The connection between the expression pattern
and tumor grade is statistically analyzed. During the analysis
of data, key molecules (brevican, cadherin-12, fibronectin and
integrin-β1) correlating the most with tumor grade were se-
lected. While the mRNA level of brevican, ErbB2, fibronec-
tin, integrin-β1 and versican discriminates low-grade from
high-grade gliomas, of proteins RHAMM, integrin-α1 and
MMP2 seems important. The expression pattern was found
to be distinctive for tumor grade, as statistical classifiers are

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