Uniparental Disomy May Be Associated with NPM Mutations in AML with a Normal Karyotype.

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a heterogeneous group of neoplastic disorders characterized by an abnormal proliferation of the myeloid precursors and a maturation block. A large proportion of AML cases have either a normal karyotype or non-recurrent chromosomal alterations. Underlying genetic lesions of some of these cases have been characterized with the discovery of MLL-internal tandem duplications, activating FLT3 mutations and NPM mutations. Loss of heterozygosity (LOH) derives from the loss of one of the two alleles at a given locus and can be a sign of inactivation of tumor-suppressor genes. We performed a high-resolution genotype analysis on DNA obtained from 19 AML patients with a normal karyotype, both at diagnosis and in samples obtained in complete remission(assessed by multiparametric flow cytometry) using the 10K SNP Array (Affymetrix). Both LOH and copy number analysis, as well as visualization of these analysis were performed by means of the dChip software (M. Lin et al., Bioinformatics (2004), 20:1233–40). A mean call rate of 96.8%. SNP array-based LOH analysis revealed that 4 patients presented large regions of homozygosity at diagnosis which were absent from samples in complete remission. In all four patients copy number analysis indicated no gross chromosomal losses or gains, as was confirmed by conventional cytogenetic analysis. Therefore, it can concluded that the LOH observed in these four patients was due to the presence of uniparental disomy.

Simultaneous analysis of FLT-3 internal tandem duplications (FLT-3/ITD), FLT3- D835 mutations, NPM mutations and MLL rearrangements was performed using conventional molecular methods. Two of these patients (UPN2 and UPN12) had FLT-3/ITD in association with NPM mutations. UPN4 had a mutated form of NPM whereas in patient UPN16 FLT-3 and NPM genes were in the germ line configuration. All four cases were negative for MLL rearrangements and FLT-3-D835 mutations. These results suggest that NPM and FLT3 mutations may be associated with acquired somatic recombinations. It remains to be investigated whether there are loci preferentially involved by these events.