Background: The introduction of pathology tissue-chromatin immunoprecipitation (PAT-ChIP), a technique allowing chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) from formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues, has extended the application of chromatin studies to clinical patient samples. However, extensive crosslinking introduced during routine tissue fixation of clinical specimens may hamper the application of PAT-ChIP to genome-wide studies (PAT-ChIP-Seq) from archived tissue samples. The reduced efficiency in chromatin extraction from over-fixed formalin archival samples is the main hurdle to overcome, especially when low abundant epigenetic marks (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrimary sarcoma tumours of the prostate are rare and are classified, according to their histology, as stromal tumours of uncertain malignant potential (STUMP) and stromal prostatic sarcoma (PS; low and high grade). We describe a case of a 71-year-old man that developed progressive urinary obstruction symptoms and was subjected to a transurethral prostatic resection (TURP). Histologically, there is a diffuse proliferation of epithelioid and spindle cells that showed rare atypical mitotic figures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolymorphisms in the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) gene have been associated with altered sensitivity to glucocorticoids. We designed a high-resolution melting (HRM) assay to detect, simultaneously, the three most intriguing GR polymorphisms, selected on the bases of clinical relevance and frequencies in caucasian population as described in literature. HRM enables the detection of ER22/23EK and N363S genotypes but fails to discriminate homozygous mutant for the BclI polymorphism from wild-type samples, however a simple spike experiment leads to a clear discrimination between these genotypes.
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