Chromosome instability (CIN) is deleterious to normal cells because of the burden of aneuploidy. However, most human solid tumors have an abnormal karyotype implying that gain and loss of chromosomes by cancer cells confers a selective advantage. CIN can be induced in the mouse by inactivating the spindle assembly checkpoint. This is lethal in the germline but we show here that adult T cells and hepatocytes can survive conditional inactivation of the Mad2l1 SAC gene and resulting CIN. This causes rapid onset of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) and progressive development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), both lethal diseases. The resulting DNA copy number variation and patterns of chromosome loss and gain are tumor-type specific, suggesting differential selective pressures on the two tumor cell types.
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Animal experimentation: All animals were kept in pathogen-free housing under guidelines approved by the Center for Animal Resources and Comparative Medicine at Harvard Medical School or at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Animal protocols were approved by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Medical School Committees on Animal Care (IACUC numbers I04272 and IS00000178), UK Home Office, and UMCG animal facility (DEC 6369).
© 2017, Foijer et al.
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