Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a heterogeneous disease with respect to clinical prognosis and acquired chromosomal aberrations. After routine banding cytogenetic analysis 45% of AML patients show a normal karyotype (NK-AML). For a better understanding of development and progression in AML, it is important to find markers which could be primary genetic aberrations. Therefore, in this study 31 patients with NK-AML were analyzed by new high resolution molecular cytogenetic approaches. A combination of multitude multicolor banding and metaphase microdissection-based comparative genomic hybridization revealed deletions of the subtelomeric regions in 6% of the studied cases. According to these results, locus-specific probes for the subtelomeric regions of chromosomes 5, 9, 11, 12 and 13 were applied on 22 of the studied 31 NK-AML cases. Surprisingly, 50% of them showed deletions or duplications. These aberrations occurred in the in vitro proliferating as well as in the non-proliferating cells. Meta-analysis of the aberrant regions revealed that they often include genes known to be associated with tumors, e.g. RASA3 on chromosome 13. These results implicate that aberrations in the subtelomeric regions of NK-AML occur quite often and may be considered as primary genetic changes, and should not be neglected in future diagnostic approaches.

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