The Retinoblastoma Protein

Margit Balázs, Viktória Koroknai, István Szász, Szilvia Ecsedi, Balázs, Margit, Koroknai, Viktória, Szász, István, Ecsedi, Szilvia

It is well known that chromosomal aberrations of tumors are associated with the initiation and progression of malignancy. Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) is a powerful, rapid method to detect chromosome copy number and structural alterations in tissue sections, chromosome, or interphase cellular preparations via hybridization of complementary probe sequences. The technique is based on the complementary nature of DNA double strands, which allows fluorescently labeled DNA probes to be used as probes to label the complementary sequences of target cells, chromosomes, and tissues. FISH technique has many applications, including basic gene mapping, used in pathological diagnosis to detect chromosome and gene copy number aberrations, translocations, microdeletions, and duplications. For the recognition of gene amplifications and deletions, locus-specific probes that are collections of one or a few cloned DNA sequences are routinely used. Multiplex-FISH (M-FISH) technique visualizes all chromosomes with different colors using spectrally distinct fluorophores for each chromosome in one experiment to detect numerical and structural alterations of chromosomes obtained from tumor cells. Recently many of the gene-specific probes are commercially available.