germline mutations in women with familial breast cancer and a relative with haematological malignancy

International audienceBiallelic inactivation of the gene causes ataxia–telangiectasia (A–T), a complex neurological disease associated with a high risk of leukaemias and lymphomas. Mothers of A–T children, obligate heterozygote mutation carriers, have a breast cancer (BC) relative risk of about 3. The frequency of carriers in BC women with a BC family history has been estimated to be 2.70%. To further our clinical understanding of familial BC and examine whether haematological malignancies are predictive of germline mutation, we estimated the frequency of heterozygote mutation carriers in a series of 122 BC women with a family history of both BC and haematological malignancy and without mutation. The gene screening was performed with a new high throughput method, EMMA (enhanced mismatch mutation analysis). Amongst 28 different variants, eight mutations have been identified in eight patients: two mutations leading to a putative truncated protein and six being likely deleterious mutations. One of the truncating mutations was initially interpreted as a missense mutation, p.Asp2597Tyr, but is actually a splice mutation (c.7789G>T/p.Asp2597_Lys2643>LysfsX3). The estimated frequency of heterozygote mutation carriers in our series is 6.56% (95% CI: 2.16–10.95), a significantly higher figure than that observed in the general population, estimated to be between 0.3 and 0.6%. Although a trend towards an increased frequency of carriers was observed, it was not different from that observed in a population of familial BC women not selected for haematological malignancy as the frequency of carriers was 2.70%, a value situated in the confidence interval of our study

OTmedia: The French Transmedia News Observatory

International audienceWho said What, Where and How? How are images, video and stories spreading out? Who produces the information? OTMedia addresses these questions by collecting, enriching and analysing continuously more than 1500 streams of French media from TV Radio, Web, AFP, and Twitter. Two studies on media produced by end users with the OTMedia framework are presented

Droplet Microfluidic and Magnetic Particles Platform for Cancer Typing

International audienceAnalyses of nucleic acids are routinely performed in hospital laboratories to detect gene alterations for cancer diagnosis and treatment decision. Among the different possible investigations, mRNA analysis provides information on abnormal levels of genes expression. Standard laboratory methods are still not adapted to the isolation and quantitation of low mRNA amounts and new techniques needs to be developed in particular for rare subsets analysis. By reducing the volume involved, time process, and the contamination risks, droplet microfluidics provide numerous advantages to perform analysis down to the single cell level.We report on a droplet microfluidic platform based on the manipulation of magnetic particles that allows the clinical analysis of tumor tissues. In particular, it allows the extraction of mRNA from the total-RNA sample, Reverse Transcription, and cDNA amplification, all in droplets