Lymphomas are lymphoid malignancies derived from B or T lymphocytes. Although they
are only listed around position 10–12 among the most frequent cancers in the Western
world, their study has been and still is paradigmatic for many aspects of cancer research. The
aim of this book is to present and discuss key methods that are used in lymphoma research.
These methods are partly speci fi c for lymphoma research, but many can be adopted to the
study of other cancers. Several chapters describe assays based on the usage of the highly
diverse B cell and T cell receptor gene rearrangements in B and T cell lymphomas, respectively.
These somatic gene rearrangements are ideal clonal markers to study minimal residual
disease and intraclonal tumor diversi fi cation. Moreover, chromosomal translocations involving
the immunoglobulin or T cell receptor gene loci are frequent oncogenic events in many
lymphomas, and the cloning of translocation breakpoint regions has led to the identi fi cation
of numerous novel oncogenes. The study of deregulated mRNA and miRNA expression has
revealed many novel insights into lymphoma pathogenesis and has led to the identi fi cation
of disease subsets. Further topics include the analysis of epigenetic alterations, the search for
viruses in lymphoma cells, the role of the B cell receptor in driving B cell lymphoma proliferation,
and the usage of cell lines and mouse models in lymphoma research. By covering
this broad variety of molecular studies of lymphomas, this book should be of interest not
only for hematologists, hematopathologists, and immunologists but also for scientists interested
in other fi elds of cancer research as well as human genetics.