Issue 4/2015. Trying to keep up with the publications of the week in the field, we have selected three manuscripts this week, which challenge some of our well-established beliefs. It’s about an autism gene losing its statistical support, a familial epilepsy gene rediscovered in focal cortical dysplasia, and the surprises of whole-genome sequencing in familial autism. Continue reading
Tag Archives: NRXN1
SETBP1, ZMYND11, and the power of joint exome and CNV analysis
Parallel worlds. There are two fields of genetics for neurodevelopmental disorders that currently produce large amounts of data – the field of copy number variation analysis and the field of exome sequencing. When assigning pathogenicity, information from both genetic technologies are rarely considered jointly. A recent study in Nature Genetics now performs a combined analysis of a large CNV and exome datasets in intellectual disability and autism. Interestingly, this method produces robust results, highlighting novel causative genes. Continue reading
NRXN1 deletions and the double hit hypothesis of idiopathic epilepsy
Old friends. Structural genomic variants or Copy Number Variations (CNVs) play an important role in many neurodevelopmental disorders including epilepsy, autism, schizophrenia and intellectual disability. Many of the CNVs representing genetic risk factors overlap between these diseases. Now, a recent study in Epilepsia reports on the exon-disrupting deletions in NRXN1 as genetic risk factors for Idiopathic Generalised Epilepsy. NRNX1 deletions were previously reported in several other neurodevelopmental disorders. However, there is an interesting and unanticipated twist to the story. Continue reading
Hypermutability of autism genes: lessons from genome sequencing
Pushing past the exome. Family exome sequencing has become a standard technology to identify de novo mutations in neurodevelopmental disorders including autism, schizophrenia, intellectual disability and epilepsy. Despite the many advances in the field, exome data is confusing and difficult to interpret. Accordingly, we were wondering what the increase from exome sequencing to genome sequencing might add other than more data and more questions. Now, a recent paper in Cell reports on family-based whole-genome sequencing in autism. And some of the results are quite surprising. Continue reading
