[Prognosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia: focus on recent biomarkers].

Early stages of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), which are the most frequent at diagnosis, have an extremely variable individual prognosis, as some patients remain stable for years whereas others develop aggressive forms of the disease less or more rapidly. Individual prognosis evaluation of early stages of CLL is then a challenge for physicians; also clinico-hematological stages are still the evaluation basis, numerous biological markers are helpful in providing independent information on patient prognosis. It is useful to distinguish the classical prognosis factors, described in the 1980s, and the recent markers described from the end of the 1990s, which are widely validated for certain, whereas for others further investigations are needed to confirm their prognostic impact.

An unusual familial chromosome 9 "variant" with variable phenotype: characterization by CGH analysis.

Heterochromatin confined to pericentromeric and secondary constriction regions plays a major role in morphological variation of chromosome 9, because of its size and affinity for pericentric inversion. We report on a 6-year-old boy with growth and language delay, minor facial anomalies and unusual chromosome 9 variant with an extra-band in the centromeric region on the conventional karyotype. Subsequent analysis by FISH and CGH identified this variant as a dicentric chromosome 9 with a duplication of the 9p12-q21 region.

Cytogenetic characterization of seven human cancer cell lines by combining G- and R-banding, M-FISH, CGH and chromosome- and locus-specific FISH.

Leukemia cell lines K562, KG1a, U937, HL60, Jurkat and solid tumor cell lines A549 and M4Beu are widely used in studies of cell cycle, apoptosis and adhesion mechanisms in cancer cells. Although the K562 and U937 cell lines were previously subjected to a detailed cytogenetic characterization, only a few molecular cytogenetic investigations have been performed on the other five cell lines. We combined several molecular cytogenetic techniques, such as fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), multicolor FISH (M-FISH), and comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) to demonstrate the precise genetic aberrations in tumor genomes of these seven cell lines.