NEOPLASIA Brief report The Aiolos transcription factor is up-regulated in chronic lymphocytic leukemia

of the Ikaros family of zinc finger pro-teins, plays an important role in the con-trol of mature B lymphocyte differentia-tion and proliferation, and its function appears to be modulated through alterna-tive splicing. To assess Aiolos isoform role in humans ’ pathologies, we studied Aiolos variant distribution and expres-sion in mature B lymphoproliferative dis-orders (chronic lymphocytic leukemia [CLL] and other B-cell lymphomas). We demonstrated that more than 80 % of ex-pressed Aiolos in normal as well as in malignant B cells is of the hAio1 type, and we showed for the first time a homoge-neous overexpression of the total amounts of Aiolos transcripts in the B cells of CLL patients, independently of ZAP-70 and IgVH mutational status prog-nosis factors. This up-regulation of Aio-los, confirmed at protein level, seems independent of Aiolos promoter H3K9 acetylation and H3K4 trimethylation