New techniques in the study of human chromosomes: methods and applications.

Abstract

In 1968, Caspersson et al 10 demonstrated that the fluorescence of chromosomes after quinacrine mustard staining revealed a typical pattern of bands for each element. The importance of this breakthrough was apparently not grasped immediately by cytogeneticists. It was only when Caspersson et al.17,18 demonstrated that each human chromosome could be identified by this technique that banding patterns were studied the world over. A labeling of the pericentromeric regions was achieved by many authors.2,60,82 Very soon other methods derived from these findings were described by Sumner et al.,101 Drets and Shaw,27 and Schnedl.96 Before these developments, the controlled denaturation of chromosomes by heat was described by Dutrillaux and Lejeune,41 using a procedure derived from the experiments of Yunis et al 107 In mid-1971, another technique, proteolytic digestion, was discovered by Dutrillaux et al 36 and numerous modifications were then reported.47,97,105 Finally, modification of the pH of the Giemsa stain solution was described by Patil et al,84 and, in a very different way, Zakharov et al 108 demonstrated that treatment of living cells with 5-bromodeoxyuridine (BUdR) could reveal a specific pattern of localized uncoiling.