Launching the Israel-Palestine Epilepsy Family Project

Family studies. In July 2015, we launched a German-Israeli-Palestinian collaborative project on familial epilepsy in Israel and Palestine. This project is supported by a specific funding mechanism by the German Research Foundation (DFG) called the Trilateral Grant. I thought that I would introduce the project to you, and let you know how we are planning to overcome our current crisis in family studies. Also, find out why I initially planned to write about Beethoven. Continue reading

Living in a post-linkage world, craving knowledge

Genomics meets linkage. This blog post is about family studies in epilepsy genetics. One of my tasks for the next two months is to write the “Trilateral Grant” – we were invited to submit a full proposal for a German-Israeli-Palestinian grant by the German Research Foundation (DFG) on the genetics of familial epilepsies. As keeping up our blogging schedule will be my other big task for the coming months, I thought that I could combine both and explore some topics regarding family studies on this blog. Let’s start with a sobering fact – small dominant families remain difficult to solve, not because of too little but rather too much genetic data. Continue reading

ST3GAL3 and exome sequencing in autosomal recessive West Syndrome

Autosomal recessive West Syndrome. Exome sequencing and other high-throughput sequencing technologies work best in the identification of recessive disorders. While many cases of West Syndrome are thought to be the result of de novo mutations, recessive inheritance is seen in a subset of patients. In a recent paper in Epilepsia, Edvardson and colleagues now report mutations in ST3GAL3 in a consanguineous Palestinian family with four affected individuals with West Syndrome. This report takes us deep into the chromosomal anatomy of the linkage region, raising the question at what point we can claim that a gene is found. Continue reading