Association between acquired uniparental disomy and homozygous gene mutation in acute myeloid leukemias.

Genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism analysis has revealed large-scale cryptic regions of acquired homozygosity in the form of segmental uniparental disomy in approximately 20% of acute myeloid leukemias. We have investigated whether such regions, which are the consequence of mitotic recombination, contain homozygous mutations in genes known to be mutational targets in leukemia. In 7 of 13 cases with uniparental disomy, we identified concurrent homozygous mutations at four distinct loci (WT1, FLT3, CEBPA, and RUNX1). This implies that mutation precedes mitotic recombination which acts as a "second hit" responsible for removal of the remaining wild-type allele, as has recently been shown for the JAK2 gene in myeloproliferative disorders.