Project description:Genomic disorders are characterized by the presence of flanking segmental duplications that predispose these regions to recurrent rearrangement. Based on the duplication architecture of the genome we investigated 130 regions which we hypothesized as candidates for novel genomic disorders 1. We tested 290 patients with mental retardation by BAC array CGH, identifying sixteen pathogenic rearrangements, including four patients with de novo microdeletions of 17q21.31. Using oligonucleotide arrays we refined the breakpoints of this microdeletion, defining a 478 kb critical region containing six genes that were deleted in all four cases. The breakpoints of this deletion, and of four other pathogenic rearrangements in 1q21.1, 15q13, 15q24 and 17q12 were mapped to flanking segmental duplications, suggesting that these are also sites of recurrent rearrangement. In common with the 17q21.31 deletion, these breakpoint regions are also sites of copy number polymorphism in controls, indicating that these may be inherently unstable genomic regions. Keywords: BAC comparative genomic hybridization of individuals with mental retardation and congenital anomalies
Project description:Gene amplifications and deletions frequently contribute to tumorigenesis. Characterization of these DNA copy-number changes is important for both the basic understanding of cancer and its diagnosis. Comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) was developed to survey DNA copy-number variations across a whole genome. With CGH, differentially labelled test and reference genomic DNAs are co-hybridized to normal metaphase chromosomes, and fluorescence ratios along the length of chromosomes provide a cytogenetic representation of DNA copy-number variation. CGH, however, has a limited ( approximately 20 Mb) mapping resolution, and higher-resolution techniques, such as fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), are prohibitively labour-intensive on a genomic scale. Array-based CGH, in which fluorescence ratios at arrayed DNA elements provide a locus-by-locus measure of DNA copy-number variation, represents another means of achieving increased mapping resolution. Published array CGH methods have relied on large genomic clone (for example BAC) array targets and have covered only a small fraction of the human genome. cDNAs representing over 30,000 radiation-hybrid (RH)-mapped human genes provide an alternative and readily available genomic resource for mapping DNA copy-number changes. Although cDNA microarrays have been used extensively to characterize variation in human gene expression, human genomic DNA is a far more complex mixture than the mRNA representation of human cells. Therefore, analysis of DNA copy-number variation using cDNA microarrays would require a sensitivity of detection an order of magnitude greater than has been routinely reported. We describe here a cDNA microarray-based CGH method, and its application to DNA copy-number variation analysis in breast cancer cell lines and tumours. This study is described more fully in Pollack JR et al.(1999) Nat Genet 23:41-6 Keywords: other