Expression Analysis of Whole Thymus and Thymic Tumors on the Sdl Mouse Model

Here we report the isolation of a murine model for heritable T cell lymphoblastic leukemia/lymphoma (T-ALL) called Spontaneous dominant leukemia (Sdl). Sdl heterozygous mice develop disease with a short latency and high penetrance; while mice homozygous for the mutation die early during embryonic development. Sdl mice harbor increased numbers of spontaneous micronuclei, and Sdl T-ALLs harbor small amplifications and deletions, including activating deletions at the Notch1 locus. Sdl mice harbor a spontaneously acquired mutation in Mcm4 (Mcm4D573H). MCM4 is part of the heterohexameric complex of MCM2-7 that is important for licensing of DNA origins prior to S phase and also serves as the core of the replicative helicase that unwinds DNA at the replication fork. This exon array was conducted to determine the expression changes that occur in pre-leukemic thymus samples at 21 days of age, as well as thymic tumors in the Sdl model. generated pairwise comparisons of wild-type > pre-leukemic and wild-type > thymic tumor. Transcripts with a posterior probability of differential expression >95% and a q-value < 0.05 were considered to be significantly differentially expressed.