A Genome-Wide Map of Acquired Uniparental Disomy in Acute Myeloid Leukemia.

The recent discovery of acquired uniparental disomy (aUPD) in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) has been linked to homozygosity for mutations in certain genes (Raghavan et al, Cancer Res. 2005, Fitzgibbon et al, Cancer Res. 2005). Although this phenomenon, which is undetectable by conventional cytogenetics, has been confirmed in subsequent small-scale studies, its extent and frequency remains uncertain. To determine the frequency and distribution of aUPD, DNA samples from 455 young adult AML patients entered in the UK Medical Research Council AML10 trial were analyzed using Mapping 10K 2.0 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays (Affymetrix Inc.). Genomic DNA from blood samples of ten non-leukemic individuals was used as control to estimate the copy number values (control set I). We defined aUPD as 50 consecutive homozygous markers but allowed 2 heterozygous calls to accommodate contaminating normal tissue. Using this criterion a false positive rate of 3.3% was calculated from an available data of 90 independent controls (control set I). Overall, 120 regions of UPD were observed in 79 AML cases (17%), 87% of which involved at least one breakpoint, i.e. resulted from mitotic recombination, and 13% were whole chromosome aUPDs arising from chromosomal non-disjunction. They were the sole aberration, as detected by SNP arrays, in 61 samples (13%), and 84% of these had only a single region of aUPD. There was a non-random distribution across chromosomes; 13q (n=18 cases), 11p (n=8) and 11q (n=9) were the most frequently affected. Other chromosomes with regions of recurrent aUPD were 2p (n=7), 2q (n=6), 1p (n=5), 19q (n=4), 17q12–q21.2 (n=4), 21q (n=4), 9p (n=3), Xq (n=3), 6p (n=2), and 17p (n=2). Acquired UPDs were observed across all cytogenetic risk groups: in 25% of adverse risk patients, 11% of favorable risk, 19% of normal karyotype and 10% of the remaining intermediate risk patients. Samples with aUPD13q (5% of samples) belonged exclusively to the intermediate risk group. Chromosome 13 was the only chromosome to show recurrent whole chromosome aUPD. Fifteen samples with aUPD13q covered the region of the FLT3 gene at 13q12.2; all 15 had a FLT3-internal tandem duplication (ITD) and all cases with a high FLT3-ITD mutant level > 50% of total had 13q aUPD. Gains and losses were observed in 12% and 14% of the samples respectively. As expected, gains on chromosome 8 and losses on chromosomes 5 and 7 were common, confirming the general utility of this approach. No homozygous losses were observed. Comparison of arrays with cytogenetic analysis showed that additional information (aUPDs and/or copy number changes) was obtained in 23% of cases with a normal karyotype and 38% of cases without available cytogenetics. This study highlights the importance of aUPD in the development of AML and pinpoints regions that may contain novel mutational targets.