Background: Sensitivity to ionizing radiation differs between individuals, but there is a limited understanding of the biological mechanisms that account for these variations. One example of such mechanisms are the mutations in the ATM (mutated ataxia telangiectasia) gene, that cause the rare recessively inherited disease Ataxia telangiectasia (AT). Hallmark features include chromosomal instability and increased sensitivity to ionizing radiation (IR).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGenetic predisposition is one of the major risk factors for pediatric cancer, with ~10% of children being carriers of a predisposing germline alteration. It is likely that this is the tip of the iceberg and many children are underdiagnosed, as most of the analysis focuses on single or short nucleotide variants, not considering the full spectrum of DNA alterations. Hence, we applied optical genome mapping (OGM) to our cohort of 34 pediatric cancer patients to perform an unbiased germline screening and analyze the frequency of structural variants (SVs) and their impact on cancer predisposition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe mutational landscape of B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (BCP-ALL), the most common pediatric cancer, is not fully described partially because commonly applied short-read next generation sequencing has a limited ability to identify structural variations. By combining comprehensive analysis of structural variants (SVs), single-nucleotide variants (SNVs), and small insertions-deletions, new subtype-defining and therapeutic targets may be detected. We analyzed the landscape of somatic alterations in 60 pediatric patients diagnosed with the most common BCP-ALL subtypes, + and classical hyperdiploid (HD), using conventional cytogenetics, single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array, whole exome sequencing (WES), and the novel optical genome mapping (OGM) technique.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFApplication of next-generation sequencing may lead to the detection of secondary findings (SF) not related to the initially analyzed disease but to other severe medically actionable diseases. However, the analysis of SFs is not yet routinely performed. We mined whole-exome sequencing data of 231 pediatric cancer patients and their parents who had been treated in our center for the presence of SFs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe improvement in sensitive techniques has allowed the detection of tumor-specific aberrations in circulating tumor (ct) DNA. Amplification-refractory mutation system PCR has been used for the analysis of ctDNA to detect resistance-causing mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor gene (eg, EGFR T790M) in lung cancer patients. So far, Streck tubes have been widely used as standard blood collection tubes.
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