Researchers in Germany present a dual-color ERG break-apart assay that uses both chromogenic in situ hybridization and silver in situ hybridization in the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics. They compared their approach to detecting the TMPRSS2-ERG fusion gene with fluorescence in situ hybridization. "Our findings demonstrate that the ERG rearrangement status can reliably be assessed by CS-ISH," the researchers write. "Further, the CS-ISH technique combines the accuracy and precision of FISH with the ease of bright-field microscopy."

Also in the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center introduce their high-resolution melting-based method to identify DNA methyltransferase 3A mutations in acute myeloid leukemia patients. With this approach, the researchers examined 104 AML patients for mutations in exons 8 through 10 and 15 through 23, which encode the proline-tryptophan-tryptophan-proline, ATR-DNMT3-DNMT3L zinc finger, and MTase domains of DNMT3A and compared it to Sanger sequencing. "On the whole, the 0% false-negative and relatively low false-positive rates make HRM a very reliable screening method for DNMT3A mutations and drastically decreases the number of samples requiring direct sequencing," they write.