ABSTRACT
At the department of Biology - University of Indonesia, the use of a modified von Hemel procedure in slide processing often gives incomplete metaphases due to chromosome losses during the processing. This study is to know the percentage of the incomplete metaphases, to test if the chromosome loss is influenced by chromosome size, and how far all of these will give rise to a false diagnosis. The material is a harvest of fixated blood culture from five normal female patients (46,XX). Slides were prepared from the material and "R-band" stained. Then we analyzed and searched for 115 metaphases with only one chromosome loss that could be analyzed. The result shows that 64.19 % out of 1303 metaphases were incomplete, and 9.29 % or 121 metaphases with only one chromosome loss. It is found that each chromosome has different probability of loss which depends on the size of chromosome. The smaller the chromosome, the greater the chance of loss, but all of these do not lead to any false diagnosis. Chromosome Loss During Slide Processing Using a Modified Von Hemel Procedure;Chromosome Loss During Slide Processing Using a Modified Von Hemel Procedure