BACKGROUND Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker disease is a rare form of prion disease. OBJECTIVE To determine the prion mutation in a 51-year-old man without a family history of neurologic disease who died from Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker disease. PATIENT AND METHODS The patient was a 51-year-old man who died after a 9-year illness characterized by dementia and eventually ataxia. Neuropathol...

We describe a 67-year-old Japanese man with probable sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) who had valine homozygosity at codon 129, a rarity in the Japanese. T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) detected high-intensity lesions in the bilateral middle cerebellar peduncles and basal ganglia as well as cerebellar and cortical atrophy. He developed cerebellar ataxia and subsequent menta...

We review concepts and methods for comparative analysis of complete genomes including assessments of genomic compositional contrasts based on dinucleotide and tetranucleotide relative abundance values, identifications of rare and frequent oligonucleotides, evaluations and interpretations of codon biases in several large prokaryotic genomes, and characterizations of compositional asymmetry betwe...

Clinical failure of Malarone™ chemoprophylaxis is extremely rare. We report a case of Plasmodium falciparum malaria in a returned traveler to Ghana who fully adhered to atovaquone-proguanil (Malarone™) chemoprophylaxis daily dosing, yet took the pills on an empty stomach. Screening of the P. falciparum isolate revealed triple codon mutation of Dhfr at positions 51, 59, and 108. Plasma drug leve...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE horizontal gaze palsy with progressive scoliosis (HGPPS) is a rare congenital disorder caused by mutation in the ROBO3 gene. It is characterized by absent horizontal eye movements with progressive scoliosis developing in childhood and adolescence. To our knowledge, both diffusion tensor imaging evaluation in HGPPS patients who present with stroke and truncating stop codon...

Mutations in the early growth response 2 gene (EGR2) cause demyelinating neuropathies differing in severity and age of onset. We tested 46 unrelated Czech patients with dominant or sporadic demyelinating CMT neuropathy for mutations in the EGR2 gene. One novel de-novo mutation (Arg359Gln, R359Q) was identified in heterozygous state in a patient with a typical CMT1 phenotype, progressive moderat...

Objective(s) P53 is an important tumor suppressor, which is mutated in later stages of many cancers and leads to resistance to chemotherapy. The aim of this study was to reveal mutations of TP53 in colorectal cancer in Kerman province. Materials and Methods A total of Forty-three colon cancer specimens as paraffin block or fresh tissues, which passed stage IIIA, were selected. Three exons 5,...

Hyperparathyroidism occurs in 20-30% of MEN2A syndrome patients. It is usually associated with mild disease and is frequently asymptomatic, especially in younger age. There is genotype/phenotype association and PHP is usually associated with codon 634 mutations; however association with more "rare" mutations has also been reported. The pathology of the parathyroid glands includes hyperplasia, a...

Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) deficiency is a rare autosomal recessive disorder. A novel homozygous MTHFR c.474A>T (p.G158G) mutation was detected in two unrelated children of Jewish Bukharian origin. This mutation generates an abnormal splicing and early termination codon. A carrier frequency of 1:39 (5/196) was determined among unrelated healthy Bukharian Jews. Given the disease...

Myoclonus dystonia syndrome is a rare movement disorder featured by myoclonic jerks and dystonia. We identified here a point mutation in ε-sarcoglycan gene exon 6 associating with inherited myoclonus dystonia syndrome in a Chinese Han family. The mutation identified induces a stop codon and terminates the transcription of ε-sarcoglycan mRNA. This in turn results in a large truncation of ε-sarco...