Bi‐allelic silencing of the Fanconi anaemia gene FANCF in acute myeloid leukaemia

Fanconi anaemia (FA) is a chromosomal instability disorder associated with a high risk of acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). Previous work has shown that the AML cell line CHRF‐288, derived from a sporadic AML‐M7 patient, does not express FANCF protein and exhibits a cellular FA phenotype. We show that this phenotype is corrected by a FANCF‐expressing plasmid and that the absence of FANCF protein is explained by hypermethylation of the promoter region of the FANCF gene. As FANCF is localized in a hot‐spot region for somatic hypermethylation (11p15), FANCF silencing might be an early step in sporadic carcinogenesis, including leukaemogenesis.