Chromosome aneuploidy, an abnormal number of chromosomes, in human gametes and embryos is a major cause of IVF failure and miscarriage and can result in affected live births. To avoid these outcomes and improve implantation and live birth rates, preimplantation genetic screening aims to identify euploid embryos before transfer but has been restricted to analysis of a limited number of chromosom...

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...

Aneuploidy, the most common chromosomal abnormality at birth and the main ascertained cause of pregnancy loss in humans, originates primarily from chromosome segregation errors during oogenesis. Here, we report that heterozygosity for a mutation in the mitotic checkpoint kinase gene, Bub1, induces aneuploidy in female germ cells of mice and that the effect increases with advancing maternal age....

The role of aneuploidy (the cellular state of having an abnormal number of chromosomes) in cancer is not well understood. A recent theory suggests that aneuploidy may be an initial step towards the generation of variation in cancer. This theory however is very difficult to test in biological experiments. To address this theory and explore the role that aneuploidy has on the development of cance...

Aneuploidy decreases cellular fitness, yet it is also associated with cancer, a disease of enhanced proliferative capacity. To investigate one mechanism by which aneuploidy could contribute to tumorigenesis, we examined the effects of aneuploidy on genomic stability. We analyzed 13 budding yeast strains that carry extra copies of single chromosomes and found that all aneuploid strains exhibited...

Frequent chromosomal aneuploidy has recently been discovered in normal neurons of the developing and mature murine CNS. Toward a more detailed understanding of aneuploidy and its effects on normal CNS cells, we examined the genomes of cells in the postnatal subventricular zone (SVZ), an area that harbors a large number of neural stem and progenitor cells (NPCs), which give rise to neurons and g...

It has long been appreciated that tumor cells carry chromosomal aberrations (1). Deviation from the paired ordering of autosomes and sex chromosomes by either increasing or decreasing the copy number of a given chromosome, is referred to as aneuploidy. Errors in the faithful segregation of chromosomes during mitotic or meiotic cell division play a crucial role in the generation of chromosomal a...

Accurate chromosome segregation during cell division is essential to maintain genome stability, and chromosome segregation errors are causally linked to genetic disorders and cancer. An anaphase chromosome bridge is a particular chromosome segregation error observed in cells that enter mitosis with fused chromosomes/sister chromatids. The widely accepted Breakage/Fusion/Bridge cycle model propo...

Mosaic aneuploidy and uniparental disomy (UPD) arise from mitotic or meiotic events. There are differences between these mechanisms in terms of (i) impact on embryonic development; (ii) co-occurrence of mosaic trisomy and UPD and (iii) potential recurrence risks. We used a genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array to study patients with chromosome aneuploidy mosaicism, UPD and one ...