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Updated: Oct 26, 2025

Generation and Isolation of Cell Cycle-arrested Cells with Complex Karyotypes
Published on: April 13, 2018
Solving the chromosome puzzle of aneuploidy in cancer
1Department of Pathology, Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA; Department of Molecular Biotechnology and Health Sciences, University of Torino, Torino 10126, Italy.
Abstract:
Chromosome instability (CIN) and aneuploidy are hallmarks of cancer cells, typically associated with aggressiveness and poor outcomes. Historically, the causative link between aneuploidy and cancer has been difficult to study due to its intrinsic complexity and the poor fitness of aneuploid cells. In this issue of Genes & Development, two companion papers (Trakala and colleagues [pp. 1079-1092] and Shoshani and colleagues [pp. 1093-1108]) exploited sophisticated mouse models to study the progression of aneuploidy from early phases to established tumors. Both groups observed that, while in the early nontumoral cells aneuploidy is characterized by random chromosomal gains, established tumors display a stereotypic karyotype with recurrent gains of only a few chromosomes. Thus, aneuploidy in tumors is not random but shows reproducible patterns of chromosomal changes induced by mechanisms that these two studies are beginning to unveil.
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