A comprehensive analysis of rare genetic variation in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in the UK

Sarah Morgan, Aleksey Shatunov, William Sproviero, Ashley R Jones, Maryam Shoai, Deborah Hughes, Ahmad Al Khleifat, Andrea Malaspina, Karen E Morrison, Pamela J Shaw, Christopher E Shaw, Katie Sidle, Richard W Orrell, Pietro Fratta, John Hardy, Alan Pittman, Ammar Al-Chalabi

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Abstract

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a progressive neurodegenerative disease of motor neurons. About 25 genes have been verified as relevant to the disease process, with rare and common variation implicated. We used next generation sequencing and repeat sizing to comprehensively assay genetic variation in a panel of known amyotrophic lateral sclerosis genes in 1126 patient samples and 613 controls. About 10% of patients were predicted to carry a pathological expansion of the C9orf72 gene. We found an increased burden of rare variants in patients within the untranslated regions of known disease-causing genes, driven by SOD1, TARDBP, FUS, VCP, OPTN and UBQLN2. We found 11 patients (1%) carried more than one pathogenic variant (P = 0.001) consistent with an oligogenic basis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. These findings show that the genetic architecture of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is complex and that variation in the regulatory regions of associated genes may be important in disease pathogenesis.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1611-1618
Number of pages8
JournalBrain : a journal of neurology
Volume140
Issue number6
Early online date18 Apr 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2017

Keywords

  • Journal Article

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