Dear Editor,
We read with interest the letter sent by Bertrand et al., in response to our paper on DLBCL with t(14;18) and MYC rearrangements. In this letter, they argued that we should have refered their paper in Leukemia (2007;21:515–23), describing 3 cases DLBCL cases with t(8;9). Actually, at the time of our paper submission, their paper was not published, and we could not be aware of this report. They secondly strongly argued that PAX5 is probably not involved in the translocation (based on their unpublished data), and that we should have shown data supporting our hypothesis. Since the main objective of our publication was the report of the clinical aggressiveness of these types of DLBCL, we thought that the molecular description of the translocation was not an issue in this context. To answer to this dispute, we report here some data supporting our hypothesis. This case was extensively analyzed using metaphase, interphase, and fibe-FISH. Using different combinations of PAC and BAC probes, we did show that the translocation occurred upstream from the PAX5 gene, in a <100-kb distance (split of BAC PRCI11-465M18). We agree that this is not a formal demonstration that PAX5 is the target of the translocation, but the FISH data at least support this hypothesis.