Detection of immunoglobulin gene rearrangement in lymphoid malignancies of B‐cell lineage by seminested polymerase chain reaction gene amplification

Abstract

Seminested polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to amplify the DNA fragments of the complementarity-determining region 3 of the immunoglobulin (Ig) gene heavy chain from the malignant cell specimens of patients with leukemias and lymphomas of B-cell lineage. Two different pairs of primers were used sequentially. Twenty of the 27 (74%) acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) patients, 14 of 19 (74%) chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients and eight of 20 (40%) non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) patients, who had rearrangement of the Ig gene heavy chain by Southern analysis, were positive by the seminested PCR. False-negative results appeared to occur more commonly in cases of lymphoma. The PCR analysis was also less likely to be positive if one-stage PCR studies with either pair of primers were both negative. The seminested PCR technique was found to have a high sensitivity of detecting malignant cells at the level of 0.02%. The clinical application of this assay needs to be investigated further.