To investigate the possibility of applying the primed in situ labelling (PRINS) method to detect chromosome aberrations in brain gliomas and eventually for pathological diagnosis, PRINS with chromosome 10 and 12 centromere specific primers as well as chromosome 1 telomere specific primer was carried out on tissues from 5 brain glioma cases, of which 4 cases were found to have monosomy 10 or loss of one copy of chromosome 10. The remaining case was found to have trisomy 12 and multi-copies of chromosome 1. It is suggested that PRINS is a new molecular cytological bio-technique which is faster, simpler and more efficient than conventional fluorescence in situ hybridization, and which may be clinically applied to detect chromosome aberrations in brain gliomas in the future.