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Cytogenetics and molecular genetics

T(6;14)(q25;q32) involves BCL11B and is highly associated with mixed-phenotype acute leukemia, T/myeloid

Leukemia volume 34, pages 2509–2512 (2020)Cite this article

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Mixed-phenotype acute leukemia (MPAL) is rare, composed of several subtypes including B/myeloid, T/myeloid, and scattered cases with both T-cell and B-cell lineage commitment. Although balanced translocations including t(9;22)(q34.1;q11.2)/BCR-ABL1 and t(v;11q23.3)/KMT2A have been identified in some cases of MPAL, these translocations are not specific to MPAL and can occur in other acute leukemias.

The t(6;14)(q25;q32) has been described in the literature in the form of rare case reports in the past 30 years [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. In one of the earlier studies, fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) assay was performed and showed that the breakpoint on chromosome 14 was located at q32.2, which contains the B-cell lymphoma/leukemia 11 B (BCL11B) gene, implicating its potential involvement [6]. Two more recent studies confirmed the involvement of BCL11B, which via the translocation is inserted into a non-coding region on chromosome 6q25 [11, 12]. To date, there are very limited studies in which the impact of the t(6;14)(q25;q32) on BCL11B expression has been explored. Furthermore, a systematic study to characterize the clinicopathological features of cases with t(6;14)(q25;q32) is also lacking; this is largely due to the rarity of cases carrying this translocation.

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Fig. 1: The morphology, immunophenotype, and karyotype of MPAL, T/myeloid with t(6;14)(q25;q32) (Case #1 in Supplementary Table 1).
Fig. 2: The expression of BCL11B.

Data availability

The whole-genome and RNA sequencing of the case study is available at the European Genome-phenome Archive under EGAS00001003799.

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Acknowledgements

To Cancer Genomics Laboratories headed by Curtis Gumbs for sequencing support. Bioinformatics pipeline support was provided by John Zhang and Xingzhi Song. To Kadir Akdemir for assistance in visualizations of public epigenomic datasets.

Funding

MD Anderson Start-Up fund to WW, Cancer Prevention Research Institute (R120501) to PAF, CPRIT Research Training Grant RP170067 to CJK, and Welch Foundation’s Robert A. Welch Distinguished University Chair Award G-0040 to PAF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Hematopathology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA

    Wei Wang, Shimin Hu, Carlos E. Bueso-Ramos, Hong Fang, Guilin Tang, Zhenya Tang, M. James You, Joseph D. Khoury & L. Jeffrey Medeiros

  2. Department of Genomic Medicine, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA

    Hannah Beird, Caleb Jonathan Kroll, Feng Wang & P. Andrew Futreal

  3. Department of Leukemia, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA

    Koichi Takahashi

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Wang, W., Beird, H., Kroll, C.J. et al. T(6;14)(q25;q32) involves BCL11B and is highly associated with mixed-phenotype acute leukemia, T/myeloid. Leukemia 34, 2509–2512 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41375-020-0761-9

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