Autosomal recessive cerebellar ataxias and autosomal recessive hereditary spastic paraplegias are clinically and genetically heterogeneous disorders with diverse neurological and non-neurological features. We herein describe a Japanese patient with a slowly progressive form of ataxia and spastic paraplegia. Using whole exome sequencing, we identified a novel homozygous frameshift mutation in SP...

Discriminating the causative disease variant(s) for individuals with inherited or de novo mutations presents one of the main challenges faced by the clinical genetics community today. Computational approaches for variant prioritization include machine learning methods utilizing a large number of features, including molecular information, interaction networks, or phenotypes. Here, we demonstrate...

Intratubular germ cell neoplasia, the precursor of testicular germ cell tumors (TGCTs), is hypothesized to arise during embryogenesis from developmentally arrested primordial germ cells (PGCs) or gonocytes. In early embryonal life, the PGCs migrate from the yolk sac to the dorsal body wall where the cell population separates before colonizing the genital ridges. However, whether the malignant t...

BACKGROUND Distinguishing between individuals is critical to those conducting animal/plant breeding, food safety/quality research, diagnostic and clinical testing, and evolutionary biology studies. Classical genetic identification studies are based on marker polymorphisms, but polymorphism-based techniques are time and labor intensive and often cannot distinguish between closely related individ...

Ataxia demonstrates substantial phenotypic and genetic heterogeneity. We set out to determine the diagnostic yield of exome sequencing in pediatric patients with ataxia without a molecular diagnosis after standard-of-care assessment in Canada. FORGE (Finding Of Rare disease GEnes) Canada is a nation-wide project focused on identifying novel disease genes for rare pediatric diseases using whole-...

Nadine Norton, PhD1, Duanxiang Li, MD, MS1, Evadnie Rampersaud, PhD2, Ana Morales, MS, CGC1, Eden R. Martin, PhD2, Stephan Zuchner, MD2, Shengru Guo, MS2, Michael Gonzalez, BSc2, Dale J. Hedges, PhD2, Peggy D. Robertson, PhD3, Niklas Krumm, BA3, Deborah A. Nickerson, PhD3, and Ray E. Hershberger, MD1 on behalf of the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute GO Exome Sequencing Project & the Exom...

Autosomal recessive cerebellar ataxia encompasses a large and heterogeneous group of neurodegenerative disorders. We employed single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis and whole exome sequencing to investigate a consanguineous Maori pedigree segregating ataxia. We identified a novel mutation in exon 10 of the SACS gene: c.7962T>G p.(Tyr2654*), establishing the diagnosis of autosomal recessi...

An association of congenital diaphragmatic hernia, dandy walker malformation and nasopharyngeal teratoma is very rare. Here, we report a fourth case with this association where chromosomal microarray and whole exome sequencing (WES) was performed to understand the underlying genetic basis. Findings of few variants especially a novel variation in HIRA provided some insights. An association of co...

Multiple platforms are available for whole-exome enrichment and sequencing (WES). This protocol is based on the Illumina TruSeq Exome Enrichment platform, which captures ∼62 Mb of the human exonic regions using 95-base DNA probes. In addition to covering the RefSeq and Ensembl coding sequences, the enriched sequences also include ∼28 Mb of RefSeq untranslated regions (UTR). The protocol can be ...