V(D)J (V, variable; D, diversity; J, joining) combination of immunoglobulin (Ig) genes established in premature B cells has been thought to be conserved throughout differentiation at mature stages. However, germinal center (GC) B cells have been shown to reexpress recombination-activating gene (RAG)-1 and RAG-2 proteins in immunized mice. Here, we present several lines of evidence indicating th...

A number of studies indicated that lineages of animals with high rates of mitochondrial (mt) gene rearrangement might have high rates of mt nucleotide substitution. We chose the hemipteroid assemblage and the Insecta to test the idea that rates of mt gene rearrangement and mt nucleotide substitution are correlated. For this purpose, we sequenced the mt genome of a lepidopsocid from the Psocopte...

Analysis of TCR rearrangement profiles of well-defined thymocyte populations in a number of individual thymi provides evidence for a new pathway of lineage commitment. In all of the thymi analyzed, alphabeta thymocytes have rearrangements in the delta locus that are enhanced for out-of-frame rearrangements. Thus, not only did alphabeta thymocytes pass through a stage in differentiation that inc...

Continued antibody gene rearrangement, termed receptor editing, is an important mechanism of central B cell tolerance that may be defective in some autoimmune individuals. We describe a quantitative assay for recombining sequence (RS) rearrangement that we use to estimate levels of antibody light chain receptor editing in various B cell populations. RS rearrangement is a recombination of a nonc...

Inactivation of the p53 tumor suppressor gene is a common finding in human cancer. In most cases, inactivation is due to a point mutation in the gene, but rearrangement of the p53 gene is sometimes observed. We analyzed the inactivation of p53 in the human pancreas cancer cell line Hs766T, which harbors a structural alteration in the p53 gene. This inactivation was found to be the result of a c...

Gene expression among the nonsegmented negative-strand RNA viruses is controlled by distance from the single transcriptional promoter, so the phenotypes of these viruses can be systematically manipulated by gene rearrangement. We examined the potential of gene rearrangement as a means to develop live attenuated vaccine candidates against Vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) in domestic swine, a nat...

Assembly of TCR and TCR genes from the TCR / locus is tightly controlled for the proper generation of and T cells. Of >100 shared variable gene segments in the TCR / locus, only a few are predominantly used for the TCR gene assembly, while most are for TCR . However, the importance and mechanisms of the selective variable gene rearrangement for T cell development are not fully understood. We re...

I report a framework for assessing whether one mitochondrial genome is significantly more rearranged than another. This relative rate of gene rearrangement test (RGR) behaves according to expectation, distinguishing between highly rearranged and mildly rearranged insect mitochondrial genomes. It may be more broadly applied to assess the relative rate of nuclear gene rearrangement.

BACKGROUND BCL6 gene rearrangement is the most frequent chromosomal abnormality in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a malignancy characterized by genetic heterogeneity and wide variability in clinical outcome. The prognostic significance of BCL6 rearrangement has not been evaluated in the context of rituximab therapy for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. We analyzed the effect of the BCL6 rearrangem...

We analyzed rearrangements of the T cell receptor ‘y-chain (T7) gene as well as rearrangements of the T cell receptor /9-chain (Ta) gene and immunoglobulin heavy-chain (IgH) gene in 68 children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). All 1 5 patients with T cell ALL showed rearrangements of both ‘F,, and T., genes. Twenty-four of 53 non-T, non-B ALL patients (45%) showed T7 gene rearrangements...