GROUNDBREAKING RESEARCH Timing of key genetic events in leukemia evolution revealed
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Work by ICR Clinical Research Fellow and PhD student Dr. Caroline Bateman, in Professor Greaves’s Biology of Childhood Leukaemia team, received star billing at the Annual American Society of Hematology meeting, held in San Francisco last December. The work revealed the timing of key genetic events in the evolution of leukemia.
Dr. Bateman compared the genomes of five pairs of identical twins with acute lymphoblastic leukemia for the patterns of mutational change. One particular mutation, which involved a fusion of two genes, was shared and identical in twins. This showed it occurred before birth. An average of three other genetic changes, which were mostly losses of DNA sequences, were detected per patient. These three changes were different in identical twins, however, which indicate they occurred after birth. It is likely that these sequential mutations drive the ‘Darwinian’ evolution of leukemic stem cells.
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