[Clonality lymphoid study through rearrangement analysis of antigen receptor]

As a rule, malignant lymphoid proliferations are clonal. While most of the time the biological potential can be established through routine pathologic examination and auxiliary techniques, some cases are difficult to classify. Moreover, there are situations in which there are dominant clones whose analysis are important, such as occur in autoimmune diseases and immunodeficiency. This paper presents in an understandable way the main techniques for the study of clonality in lymphoid lesions, i.e. the analysis of rearrangements of antigen receptor genes by multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) based tests.