Aneuploidy is frequently noted in malignant tumours. There is much controversy about its cause and effect in relation to malignant tumours. Failure of the spindle checkpoint caused by mutation of the responsible genes may be one of the important factors for the development of aneuploidy. Telomere dysfunction may also be a possible source of failure of cytokinesis resulting in aneuploidy. Eviden...

A century ago, Boveri proposed that cancer is caused by aneuploidy, an abnormal balance of chromosomes, because aneuploidy correlates with cancer and because experimental aneuploidy generates "pathological" phenotypes. Half a century later, when cancers were found to be nonclonal for aneuploidy, but clonal for somatic gene mutations, this hypothesis was abandoned. As a result, aneuploidy is now...

The terms 'haploid' and 'diploid' that describe single (n) and double (2n) chromosome sets in cells were coined by the Polish-German botanist Eduard Strasburger and originate from the Greek terms haplóos meaning 'single' and diplóos meaning 'double'. The term 'ploidy' was subsequently derived to describe the total chromosome content of cells. Consequently, the term 'euploid' refers to a chromos...

Summary Mitotic errors lead to aneuploidy, a condition of karyotype imbalance, frequently found in cancer cells. Alterations chromosome copy number induce wide variety cellular stresses, including genome instability. Here, we show that cells might exploit aneuploidy-induced instability and the resulting gene copy-number changes survive under conditions selective pressure, such as chemo...

Constitutional aneuploidy is typically caused by a single-event meiotic or early mitotic error. In contrast, somatic aneuploidy, found mainly in neoplastic tissue, is attributed to continuous chromosomal instability. More debated as a cause of aneuploidy is aneuploidy itself; that is, whether aneuploidy per se causes chromosomal instability, for example, in patients with inborn aneuploidy. We h...

Aneuploidy is invariably associated with poor proliferation of primary cells, but the specific contributions of abnormal karyotypes to cancer, a disease characterized by aneuploidy and dysregulated proliferation, remain unclear. In this study, I demonstrate that the transcriptional alterations caused by aneuploidy in primary cells are also present in chromosomally unstable cancer cell lines, bu...

Aneuploidy, the state of having a chromosome number different from a multiple of the haploid number, has been associated with diseases and developmental disorders. The role of aneuploidy in human disease pathology, especially in cancer, has been a subject of much attention and debate over the last century due to the intrinsic complexity of the phenomena and experimental challenges. Over the las...

Variations in genomic DNA content, or aneuploidy, are a well-recognized feature of normal human brain development. Whether changes in the levels of aneuploidy are a factor in Alzheimer's disease (AD) is less clear, as the data reported to date vary substantially in the levels of aneuploidy detected (0.7-11.5%), possibly due to methodological limitations, but also influenced by individual, regio...

The spindle assembly checkpoint (SAC) is essential for proper sister chromatid segregation. Defects in this checkpoint can lead to chromosome missegregation and aneuploidy. An increasing body of evidence suggests that aneuploidy can play a causal role in tumorigenesis. However, mutant mice that are prone to aneuploidy have only mild tumor phenotypes, suggesting that there are limiting factors i...