Micrometastases: marker of metastatic potential or evidence of residual disease?
Preoperative detection of micrometastases may reflect either transient shedding of cells, metastatic potential or residual disease, but postoperative micrometastases indicate minimal residual disease. Identification of these patients is important because they may benefit from adjuvant therapy.
Our study provides evidence that the RTS locus has effects on hair conformation and coat colour dilution and that the effect on coat colour dilution is clearly independent from that of the dilution locus. Finally, our results excluded several other loci that were previously reported to be associated with or to underlie hair conformation or pigmentation traits as the causal mutations of RTS and also several major functional candidate genes that are associated with hypotrichosis in humans. Our finding on the identification of a three-locus interaction that underlies RTS provides a prime example of epistatic interaction between several independent loci that is required for the expression of a distinct phenotype.