title: Quantitative analysis of mixed chimerism following allogeneic bone marrow transplantation using telomere flow-FISH.
abstract: Assessment of mixed chimerism is of particular interest for allogeneic bone marrow or peripheral blood stem cell transplantation with reduced-intensity conditioning in order to study contribution of donor-type and host-type lymphohematopoiesis. Because the length of telomere repeat sequences is frequently shorter in leukemic compared to normal hematopoietic cells, this telomere repeat polymorphism might be a useful marker to analyze mixed chimerism in selected patients with short telomeres. Recently, fluorescence in situ hybridization and flow cytometry (flow-FISH) have been shown to be valuable tools to analyze the mean telomere length in hematopoietic cells. Here, we demonstrate in a case study on a patient with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) that telomere flow-FISH can in principle be exploited to quantitate the amount of donor- and host-type cells for chimerism analysis based on distinct histogram distributions which reflect cell populations with different telomere length.
authors.affiliation: Department of Hematology/Oncology, Freiburg University Medical Center, Hugstetterstrasse 55, 79106 Freiburg, Germany. martens@ukl.uni-freiburg.de
authors.forename: U M
authors.initials: UM
authors.lastname: Martens
authors.forename: C F
authors.initials: CF
authors.lastname: Waller
authors.forename: W
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Lange
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Finke
mesh_terms: D016026:Bone Marrow Transplantation; D004247:DNA / Q000032:analysis; D005434:Flow Cytometry / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D017404:In Situ Hybridization, Fluorescence / Q000379:methods; D015451:Leukemia, Lymphocytic, Chronic, B-Cell / Q000628:therapy; D011110:Polymorphism, Genetic; D012091:Repetitive Sequences, Nucleic Acid; D016615:Telomere / Q000235:genetics*; D018183:Transplantation Chimera / Q000235:genetics*; D014184:Transplantation, Homologous
chemical_list: D004247:DNA