[Detection of clonal immunoglobulin rearrangements in paraffin embedded tissues by PCR]

A polymerase chain reaction based method was established using immunoglobulin VH and VK gene rearrangements as markers to detect clonal B cell populations in paraffin embedded sections. Family specific VH and VK primers are used in separate reactions together with the corresponding J primers to amplify rearranged VH and VK genes from genomic DNA. This allows to distinguish clonal from polyclonal B cell populations in most of the cases. The method may be helpful in routine diagnosis of B cell NHL and some morphological and immunohistochemical difficult cases.