To determine the origin of benign cystic teratomas of the ovary, chromosome-banding studies were done on normal tissues and teratomas from five patients. The normal tissues were heterozygous (+/-) for 17 chromosome polymorphisms at or near the centromere, whereas the teratomas were uniformly homozygous (+/+ or -/-). These findings and those employing electrophoretic variants indicate that ovarian teratomas are parthenogenic tumors that arise from a single germ cell after the first meiotic division.
Ataxia-telangiectasia is a rare genetic disorder associated with immune deficiency, chromosome instability, and a predisposition to lymphoid malignancy.
Under the assumption that benign ovarian teratomas in man arise parthenogenically from a germ cell by suppression of the second meiotic division, the distance of a gene from its centromere can be estimated from the observed proportion of heterozygous teratomas collected from heterozygous hosts. The frequency of heterozygous teratomas of heterozygous hosts is equivalent to the frequency of second division segregation at the gene locus which has been used for centromere-related mapping in fungal genetics for more than 40 years. Mapping functions useful for teratoma-based mapping in man are presented.
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