This ongoing project involves several stages. We have a protocol for collecting of bone marrow from normal volunteers to use for the culture of relatively pure populations of megakaryocytes. We were in the process of developing the culture conditions for megakaryocyte enrichment, but commercial culture kits recently became available for this purpose. Over the past year, we have been developing an assay for detecting mutations in somatic DNA using representational difference analysis. When this assay works reliably with test samples, we will begin to analyze patient specimens.
