Construction of a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) contig across the minimally deleted region in 13q14.3 in B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia

Loss of heterozygosity (LOH) analysis in B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (BCLL) has indicated that a frequent genetic event is loss of alleles from an approximately 500 kb region in 13q14.3, distal to the retinoblastoma gene. We have used DNA markers from this region to isolate and characterize a series of bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) which span the region between markers D13S319 and D13S25, which represents the common region of LOH. This entire region appears to be contained within only two minimally overlapping BACs, representing a maximum distance of approximately 350 kb. This BAC contig has been used to position known STS, EST and gene markers within the region. We have also used a modified differential display/RNA fingerprinting procedure designed to isolated transcribed sequences from YACs to isolate two transcribed units from the region which have also been positioned within the contig. The construction of a BAC contig with minimal redundancy provides the ideal resource from which to begin to identify candidate genes related to BCLL.