Independent variant analysis of TEAD1 and OCEL1 in 38 Aicardi syndrome patients

BACKGROUND Aicardi syndrome is a severe neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by infantile spasms, typical chorioretinal lacunae, agenesis of the corpus callosum, and other neuronal migration defects. It has been reported recently that de novo variants in TEAD1 and OCEL1 each may cause Aicardi syndrome in a single individual of a small cohort of females with this clinical diagnosis. These data were interpreted to suggest that the clinical diagnosis of Aicardi syndrome may be genetically heterogeneous. METHODS To investigate this further, we sequenced TEAD1 and OCEL1 coding regions using DNA from 38 clinically well-characterized girls with Aicardi syndrome. RESULTS We did not detect the previously reported or any other deleterious variants in any of the analyzed samples. CONCLUSIONS This suggests that the published variants represent either an extremely rare cause of Aicardi syndrome or an incidental finding.