chromosomal shattering
Shattering News: How Chromothripsis Cured a Rare Disease
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: Karyotype of a woman spontaneously cured of WHIM syndrome. These chromosome pairings, which are from her white blood cells, show a normal chromosome 2 on the left, and a truncated chromosome 2 on the right.
Source: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , NIH
The world of biomedical research is filled with surprises. Here’s a remarkable one published recently in the journal Cell [1]. A child born in the 1950s with a rare genetic immunodeficiency syndrome amazingly cured herself years later when part of one of her chromosomes spontaneously shattered into 18 pieces during replication of a blood stem cell. The damaged chromosome randomly reassembled, sort of like piecing together a broken vase, but it was still missing a shard of 164 genes—including the very gene that caused her condition.
Researchers say the chromosomal shattering probably took place in a cell in the bone marrow. The stem cell, now without the disease-causing gene, repopulated her immune system with healthy bone marrow-derived immune cells, resulting in cure of the syndrome.
