Somatic cell hybridization of Roberts syndrome and normal human fibroblasts transfected with plasmids carrying dominant selection markers

Roberts syndrome (RS) is a rare human recessive disorder involving, in the chromosomes of some patients, a characteristic puffing or splitting apart of the constitutive heterochromatin (the RS effect). We carried out somatic cell hybridizations between an RS cell strain (R22) with the heterochromatin abnormality and a hypoxanthine phosphoribosyltransferase-deficient cell strain (GM1662) with normal chromosome structure to determine if the …