Abstract

Fourteen patients with Turner syndrome and a structurally abnormal Y chromosome were analysed by PCR amplification and fluorescence in situ hybridisation for the presence of sequences specific to defined regions of the Y chromosome. Thirteen patients had a mosaic karyotype including a 45,X cell line and one case was non-mosaic in cultured lymphocytes. Ten patients had a pseudodicentric Yp chromosome, two an isodicentric Yq, one a pseudodicentric Yq, and one a derived Y chromosome. Two of the patients with a psu dic(Yp) chromosome had complex karyotypes with more than two cell lines, one of which exhibited five morphologically distinct mar(Y) chromosomes, presumably derived from a progenitor psu dic(Yp). Nine of the ten psu dic(Yp) chromosomes were positive for all Yp and Yq probes used except DYZ1 which maps to Yq12, suggesting a common breakpoint near the Yq euchromatin/heterochromatin boundary. In the three patients with a dicentric Yq chromosome two different breakpoints were observed; in two it was between PABY and the subtelomeric repeat sequence and in one it was between DYZ5 and AMGY in proximal Yp. Our results suggest that the great majority of structurally abnormal Y chromosomes found in Turner syndrome mosaics contain two copies of virtually all of the functional Y chromosome euchromatin.