Techniques Used in Leukemia Research

Leukemia research is an important and interesting effort that can help in designing more effective diagnosis approaches and treatment strategies. There are a lot of techniques or tools that used in leukemia research. Today, I’m going to introduce a little bit about those techniques and tools used in leukemia research so that we can understand more when we go further.

Cytogenetics – Powerful Tool in Leukemia Research

Conventional and molecular cytogenetics techniques are still the most important techniques for clinical diagnosis of specific subtypes of leukemia. These cytogenetics techniques are good in identifying novel genetic mutations. We can see the Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (FISH) is one of the greatest tools for detection of chromosomal abnormalities. Molecular cytogenetics is also a powerful tool in identifying the cell lineage in which the leukemia specific chromosome rearrangement occurs with the combination of immunophenotyping technique. It has been used to detect putative preleukemic cells.

Polymerase Chain Reaction in Leukemia Research

Long Distance Inversed Polymerase Chain Reaction (LDI-PCR) and panhandle-PCR are very useful to identify the fusion transcripts rapidly in the case of chimeric fusions where only one of the partner genes is known. This is essential for risk-stratification (which I mentioned in “What is Acute Leukemia?”) for disease treatment and monitoring the minimal residual disease (MRD).

Array Technology in Leukemia Research

The progression of array technology and bioinformatics allow the researchers to get high-resolution global assessment of genetic changes in the leukemia cells. Array-based Comparative Genomic Hybridization (aCGH) is another tool used for analyzing the leukemia genome whereas the Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNP) array is used for determining somatic changes in cancer. Both tools allow genome-wide detection of many kinds of submicroscopic somatic changes including loss, gain, and copy-neutral loss of heterozygosity (CN-LOH). Most of these submicroscopic somatic changes are oftenly cannot be detected by using cytogenetics and other conventional techniques.

Prenatal Backtracking for Leukemia Research

Yet, we should not forget the importance to identify the origin of the mutations as well as their functions in the leukemogenic processes. Luckily, prenatal backtracking is the best tool to trace back genetic events to early fetal origins using sensitive amplification methods. We can use it to identify the origin of the disease in pediatric leukemia effectively.

Summing up, these techniques effectively make the leukemia research much easier to be done. Maybe I will write the details about these techniques one by one in the future in Cytogenetics Cancer Research blog. I still need some times to explore more about these techniques. I hope that I can really manage to make full use of those techniques for my own research.

(Reference: Leukemia edited by Chi Wai Eric So)