A Homozygous Deletion in a Small Cell Lung Cancer Cell Line Involving a 3p21 Region with a Marked Instability in Yeast Artificial Chromosomes

Abstract All types of lung carcinoma are characterized by a high frequency of loss of sequences from the short arm of chromosome 3, the smallest region of overlap containing D3F15S2 in band p21. Here we characterize a 440-kilobase segment from this region, which we found homozygously deleted in one of our small cell lung cancer-derived cell lines. The homozygous deletion maps between UBE1L and ZnF16 , just centromeric to D3F15S2 . Yeast artificial chromosomes with inserts originating from the deleted region are very unstable and readily lose parts of their insert.