RESUMO
Lymphomas are traditionally divided into Hodgkin's lymphoma and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma(NHL), the NHL is a common hematological cancer, which represents a wide spectrum of illnesses from the most indolent to the most aggressive malignancies, and the detection of related molecular targets will be needed for diagosing each subtype of NHL. Advances in understanding the pathogenesis of NHL have improved the precision of diagnosis and the prognosis evaluation of patients with this disorder, such as chromosomal translocation leading to the up-regulation of oncogene expression. Besides, the deletion of several tumor suppressor genes may cause excessive proliferation in tumor cells, and the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) determines the differences of susceptibility, drug-resistance and prognosis of NHL. In addition, DNA methylation, histone modification, non-coding RNA and other epigenetic phenomena play an increasingly important role in the diagnosis, selection of clinical drugs and evaluation of prognosis of NHL. In this review, the recent progress of researches on chromosome translocation, deletion of tumor suppression genes, gene poly-morphism and epigenetics are summarized.