Quantitative analysis of mixed chimerism following allogeneic bone marrow transplantation using telomere flow-FISH

Ann Hematol. 2003 Jul;82(7):416-22. doi: 10.1007/s00277-003-0659-4. Epub 2003 May 24.

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.

Publication types

  • Case Reports
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Bone Marrow Transplantation*
  • DNA / analysis
  • Flow Cytometry / methods
  • Humans
  • In Situ Hybridization, Fluorescence / methods
  • Leukemia, Lymphocytic, Chronic, B-Cell / therapy
  • Polymorphism, Genetic
  • Repetitive Sequences, Nucleic Acid
  • Telomere / genetics*
  • Transplantation Chimera / genetics*
  • Transplantation, Homologous

Substances

  • DNA