Welcome to the Burack Lab
The Burack Laboratory is exploring whether the level of activation induced cytidine deaminase (AID) activity in Follicular lymphoma (FL) tumors can be used as a prognostic factor to identify FL patients who are more likely to transform into Diffuse Large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL).
Our hypothesis is that ongoing AID activity would be expressed as a high degree of tumor heterogeneity, and once any individual clone received a growth potentiating mutation, it would become the predominant cell type within the tumor and transform into DLBCL.
By using the high sequence coverage depth available with next-generation sequencing technology, we hope to approach the measurement of genomic variability at the level of approximately 0.1 – 1%, a much higher sensitivity than obtainable with traditional Sanger sequencing.
The long term goals of this study include:
- Estimation of the total amount of AID-mediated mutation within the LN from FL patients
- Estimation of relative amounts of genes mutations found in high vs low fidelity DNA repair.
- Determining whether parameters vary within the FL populations and their effectiveness as prognostic factors.
- Determining whether DNA from formalin-fixed, paraffin embedded tissues can be used for these studies.