Five occupational workers in an industrial sterilization unit at Stamboliyski Bulgaria were accidentally exposed to a very high specific activity of Cobalt-60 source on June 14, 2011. Initial cytogenetic analysis performed days 2 and 7 after radiation exposure revealed the whole body absorbed doses 5.32 Gy for patient 1, 3.40 2, 2.50 3, 1.91 4 1.24 5 [1]. Here, retrospective multicolor FISH was...

Previous analyses by fluorescence in situ hybridization of structures present 20-30 cell generations after the primary events of mammalian gene amplification have shown that tens of megabases of DNA separate each copy of the selected gene in chromosomal arrays that contain up to 15 copies. Since these structures are very unstable, it is necessary to study amplified DNA as soon as possible after...

Telomeres protect eukaryotic chromosomes from illegitimate end-to-end fusions. When this function fails, dicentric chromosomes are formed, triggering breakage-fusion-bridge cycles and genome instability. How efficient is this protection mechanism in normal cells is not fully understood. We created a positive selection assay aimed at capturing chromosome-end fusions in Schizosaccharomyces pombe....

Mouse spermatozoa and androgenetic one-cell embryos (androgenones) at various developmental stages were exposed to etoposide (1 μM), a topoisomerase II (topo II) poison, or to either of two catalytic inhibitors: ICRF-193 (10 μM) or merbarone (50 μM), for 2 h in order to study the clastogenic effects of these drugs on remodeled sperm chromatin. None of the drugs induced structural chromosome abe...