cancers with chromosomal instability

Chromosomal instability is regarded as an underlying mechanism of neoplastic progression, integral to the clonal selection and evolution that leads to cancer.

Even pre-malignant lesions as Barrett’s esophagus can be associated with extensive instability and clonal dynamics that evolve from an initial stage characterized by small recombination-based alterations to one with larger copy change events likely associated with mitotic instability.

Cancers with chromosomal instability (CIN) are held to be aneuploid/polyploid with multiple large-scale gains/deletions, but the processes underlying CIN are unclear and different types of CIN might exist.

References

 Lai LA, Paulson TG, Li X, Sanchez CA, Maley C, Odze RD, Reid BJ, Rabinovitch PS. Increasing genomic instability during premalignant neoplastic progression revealed through high resolution array-CGH. Genes Chromosomes Cancer. 2007 Jun;46(6):532-42. PMID: 17330261

 Gaasenbeek M, Howarth K, Rowan AJ, Gorman PA, Jones A, Chaplin T, Liu Y, Bicknell D, Davison EJ, Fiegler H, Carter NP, Roylance RR, Tomlinson IP. Combined array-comparative genomic hybridization and single-nucleotide polymorphism-loss of heterozygosity analysis reveals complex changes and multiple forms of chromosomal instability in colorectal cancers. Cancer Res. 2006 Apr 1;66(7):3471-9. PMID: 16585170