scholarly journals Tolerance of nonsynonymous variation is closely correlated between human and mouse orthologues

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Powell ◽  
Michelle Simon ◽  
Sara Pulit ◽  
Ann-Marie Mallon ◽  
Cecilia M. Lindgren

ABSTRACTGenic constraint describes how tolerant a gene is of nonsynonymous variation before it is removed from the population by negative selection. Here, we provide the first estimates of intraspecific constraint for mouse genes genome-wide, and show constraint is positively correlated between human and mouse orthologues (r = 0.806). We assess the relationships between mouse gene constraint and knockout phenotypes, showing gene constraint is positively associated with pleiotropy (ie an increased number of phenotype associations (R2 = 0.65)), in addition to an enrichment in lethal, developmental, and craniofacial knockout phenotypes amongst the most constrained genes. Finally, we show mouse constraint can be used to predict human genes associated with Mendelian disease, and is positively correlated with an increase in the number of known pathogenic variants in the human orthologue (R2 = 0.23). Our metrics of mouse and human constraint are available to inform future research using mouse models.

Genes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 1077
Author(s):  
Stefania Pellegrini ◽  
Lisa Elefanti ◽  
Luigi Dall’Olmo ◽  
Chiara Menin

Genetic susceptibility to nevi may affect the risk of developing melanoma, since common and atypical nevi are the main host risk factors implicated in the development of cutaneous melanoma. Recent genome-wide studies defined a melanoma polygenic risk score based on variants in genes involved in different pathways, including nevogenesis. Moreover, a predisposition to nevi is a hereditary trait that may account for melanoma clustering in some families characterized by cases with a high nevi density. On the other hand, familial melanoma aggregation may be due to a Mendelian inheritance of high/moderate-penetrance pathogenic variants affecting melanoma risk, regardless of the nevus count. Based on current knowledge, this review analyzes the complex interplay between nevi and melanoma predisposition in a familial context. We review familial melanoma, starting from Whiteman’s divergent pathway model to overall melanoma development, distinguishing between nevi-related (cases with a high nevus count and a high polygenic risk score) and nevi-resistant (high/moderate-penetrance variant-carrier cases) familial melanoma. This distinction could better direct future research on genetic factors useful to identify high-risk subjects.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (9) ◽  
pp. 2691-2698 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoming Liu

Abstract The prehistoric demography of human populations is an essential piece of information for illustrating our evolution. Despite its importance and the advancement of ancient DNA studies, our knowledge of human evolution is still limited, which is also the case for relatively recent population dynamics during and around the Holocene. Here, we inferred detailed demographic histories from 1 to 40 ka for 24 population samples using an improved model-flexible method with 36 million genome-wide noncoding CpG sites. Our results showed many population growth events that were likely due to the Neolithic Revolution (i.e., the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement). Our results help to provide a clearer picture of human prehistoric demography, confirming the significant impact of agriculture on population expansion, and provide new hypotheses and directions for future research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp Rentzsch ◽  
Max Schubach ◽  
Jay Shendure ◽  
Martin Kircher

Abstract Background Splicing of genomic exons into mRNAs is a critical prerequisite for the accurate synthesis of human proteins. Genetic variants impacting splicing underlie a substantial proportion of genetic disease, but are challenging to identify beyond those occurring at donor and acceptor dinucleotides. To address this, various methods aim to predict variant effects on splicing. Recently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to achieve better results in predicting splice variants than other strategies. Methods It has been unclear how best to integrate such process-specific scores into genome-wide variant effect predictors. Here, we use a recently published experimental data set to compare several machine learning methods that score variant effects on splicing. We integrate the best of those approaches into general variant effect prediction models and observe the effect on classification of known pathogenic variants. Results We integrate two specialized splicing scores into CADD (Combined Annotation Dependent Depletion; cadd.gs.washington.edu), a widely used tool for genome-wide variant effect prediction that we previously developed to weight and integrate diverse collections of genomic annotations. With this new model, CADD-Splice, we show that inclusion of splicing DNN effect scores substantially improves predictions across multiple variant categories, without compromising overall performance. Conclusions While splice effect scores show superior performance on splice variants, specialized predictors cannot compete with other variant scores in general variant interpretation, as the latter account for nonsense and missense effects that do not alter splicing. Although only shown here for splice scores, we believe that the applied approach will generalize to other specific molecular processes, providing a path for the further improvement of genome-wide variant effect prediction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Soo Bin Kwon ◽  
Jason Ernst

AbstractIdentifying genomic regions with functional genomic properties that are conserved between human and mouse is an important challenge in the context of mouse model studies. To address this, we develop a method to learn a score of evidence of conservation at the functional genomics level by integrating information from a compendium of epigenomic, transcription factor binding, and transcriptomic data from human and mouse. The method, Learning Evidence of Conservation from Integrated Functional genomic annotations (LECIF), trains neural networks to generate this score for the human and mouse genomes. The resulting LECIF score highlights human and mouse regions with shared functional genomic properties and captures correspondence of biologically similar human and mouse annotations. Analysis with independent datasets shows the score also highlights loci associated with similar phenotypes in both species. LECIF will be a resource for mouse model studies by identifying loci whose functional genomic properties are likely conserved.


2007 ◽  
Vol 283 (3) ◽  
pp. 1229-1233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Ben-Dov ◽  
Britta Hartmann ◽  
Josefin Lundgren ◽  
Juan Valcárcel

Alternative splicing of mRNA precursors allows the synthesis of multiple mRNAs from a single primary transcript, significantly expanding the information content and regulatory possibilities of higher eukaryotic genomes. High-throughput enabling technologies, particularly large-scale sequencing and splicing-sensitive microarrays, are providing unprecedented opportunities to address key questions in this field. The picture emerging from these pioneering studies is that alternative splicing affects most human genes and a significant fraction of the genes in other multicellular organisms, with the potential to greatly influence the evolution of complex genomes. A combinatorial code of regulatory signals and factors can deploy physiologically coherent programs of alternative splicing that are distinct from those regulated at other steps of gene expression. Pre-mRNA splicing and its regulation play important roles in human pathologies, and genome-wide analyses in this area are paving the way for improved diagnostic tools and for the identification of novel and more specific pharmaceutical targets.


Placenta ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (9) ◽  
pp. A10-A11
Author(s):  
Kenji Onda ◽  
Stephen Tong ◽  
Natalie Binder ◽  
Sally Beard ◽  
Tu'uhevaha Kaitu'u-Lino ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Qingwen Zeng ◽  
Yanjie Fan ◽  
Lili Wang ◽  
Zhuo Huang ◽  
Xuefan Gu ◽  
...  

AbstractBackground:Mucopolysaccharidosis IIIB (MPS IIIB) is a genetic disease characterized by mutations in theCase presentation:Whole exome sequencing (WES) was conducted and the putative pathogenic variants were validated by Sanger sequencing. The activity of MPS IIIB related enzyme in the patient’s blood serum was assayed. A heterozygous, non-synonymous mutation (c.1562C>T, p.P521L) as well as a novel mutation (c.1705C>A, p.Q569K) were found in theConclusions:Our results describe an atypical form of MPS IIIB and illustrate the diagnostic potential of targeted WES in Mendelian disease with unknown etiology. WES could become a powerful tool for molecular diagnosis of MPS IIIB in clinical setting.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Zhao ◽  
Guoyuan Huang ◽  
Zuosong Chen ◽  
Xiang Fan ◽  
Tao Huang ◽  
...  

AbstractCardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) and endurance performance are characterized by a complex genetic trait with high heritability. Although research has identified many physiological and environmental correlates with CRF, the genetic architecture contributing to CRF remains unclear, especially in non-athlete population. A total of 762 Chinese young female participants were recruited and an endurance run test was used to determine CRF. We used a fixed model of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for CRF. Genotyping was performed using the Affymetrix Axiom and illumina 1 M arrays. After quality control and imputation, a linear regression-based association analysis was conducted using a total of 5,149,327 variants. Four loci associated with CRF were identified to reach genome-wide significance (P < 5.0 × 10-8), which located in 15q21.3 (rs17240160, P = 1.73 × 10-9, GCOM1), 3q25.31 (rs819865, P = 8.56 × 10-9, GMPS), 21q22.3 (rs117828698, P = 9.59 × 10-9, COL18A1), and 17q24.2 (rs79806428, P = 3.85 × 10-8, PRKCA). These loci (GCOM1, GMPS, COL18A1 and PRKCA) associated with cardiorespiratory fitness and endurance performance in Chinese non-athlete young females. Our results suggest that these gene polymorphisms provide further genetic evidence for the polygenetic nature of cardiorespiratory endurance and be used as genetic biomarkers for future research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderick Clark ◽  
Miran Kenk ◽  
Kristen McAlpine ◽  
Emily Thain ◽  
Kirsten M. Farncombe ◽  
...  

Introduction: Prostate cancer is a significant cause of cancer mortality. It has been well-established that certain germline pathogenic variants confer both an increased risk of being diagnosed with prostate cancer and dying of prostate cancer.1 There are exciting developments in both the availability of genetic testing and opportunities for improved treatment of patients. On August 19, 2020, the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, Ontario, hosted a virtual retreat, bringing together international experts in urology, medical oncology, radiation oncology, medical genetics, and translational research, as well as a patient representative. We are pleased to provide this manuscript as a review of those proceedings for Canadian clinicians. Recommendations: We drafted several recommendations for future research and policy action based on this meeting: 1) Need for increased access to funding for germline testing for the common genetic disorders associated with increased risk of prostate cancer. 2) A need for increased research into identifying genetic factors influencing risk stratification, treatment response, and outcomes of prostate cancer within Canadian populations at increased genetic risk for prostate cancer. 3) Need for increased awareness about genetic risk factors among the Canadian public. 4) Need for research on patient perspectives and psychosocial outcomes in individuals identified to be at increased genetic risk of prostate cancer. 5) We support the creation of specialized multidisciplinary clinics that specialize in tailored care for patients at increased genetic risk of prostate cancer.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Marchal ◽  
Nivedita Singh ◽  
Ximena Corso-Díaz ◽  
Anand Swaroop

AbstractThree-dimensional (3D) conformation of the chromatin is crucial to stringently regulate gene expression patterns and DNA replication in a cell-type specific manner. HiC is a key technique for measuring 3D chromatin interactions genome wide. Estimating and predicting the resolution of a library is an essential step in any HiC experimental design. Here, we present the mathematical concepts to estimate the resolution of a library and predict whether deeper sequencing would enhance the resolution. We have developed HiCRes, a docker pipeline, by applying these concepts to human and mouse HiC libraries.


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