Detection of chromothripsis-like patterns from custom array platform for chronic lymphocytic leukemia diagnosis (qchip Hemo custom array v3)

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is the most frequent leukemia in Western countries. The main genetic alterations associated to this disease are loss of 13q14, loss of 11q23, trisomy 12 and, less frequently, 17p13 losses, and are routinely studied using fluorescence in situ hybridization. These genomic aberrations have been demonstrated to be important independent predictors of disease progression in CLL and their detection currently has a direct implication in the treatment strategy of the patients. It has been widely demonstrated that array-based karyotyping clearly detects DNA gains and losses and allows the identification of CLL abnormalities not included in the standard FISH panel. We have here established and tested an oligonucleotide-based array platform for the diagnosis of CLL that interrogates the most relevant chromosomal regions related with the disease and may help in the differential diagnosis between CLL and other small B-cell leukemias and may be used as a powerful prognosis tool to stratify the CLL patients. Copy number analysis using Custom Agilent 60K was performed on 47 chronic lymphocytic Leukemia patients with sex-matched control DNAs