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PubMed · 11004940

Genetics beyond Mendel. Understanding nontraditional inheritance patterns.

J Wagstaff
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Abstract

Many medical conditions that clearly have a strong genetic component are not transmitted in a straightforward dominant, recessive, or X-linked pattern. Recent progress in understanding other modes of inheritance, such as imprinting, trinucleotide repeat expansion, mitochondrial inheritance, and mosaicism, has allowed us to solve many of these hereditary puzzles. Such advances have led to improvements in diagnosis and genetic counseling for patients affected with these disorders and should be valuable in development of effective therapies for some of these disorders in the future.

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Angelman SyndromeDNA, MitochondrialFemaleGenetic Diseases, InbornGenetics, MedicalGenomic ImprintingHumansMaleMosaicismMutationTrinucleotide Repeat ExpansionJournal ArticleReview

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J Wagstaff. 2000-09-01. Genetics beyond Mendel. Understanding nontraditional inheritance patterns.. https://doi.org/10.3810/pgm.2000.09.1.1210

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Angelman syndrome is a severe neurodevelopmental disorder with cognitive impairment and neurological deficits. It results from a maternal deletion of human chromosome 15q11-13 containing two candidate genes E6-P ubiquitin-protein ligase (UBE3A) and GABA(A) receptor beta3 subunit (GABRB3), the latter of which has been also linked to autism. To clarify the potential role of GABA(A) beta3 subunit-containing inhibitory receptors in these disorders, we applied ligand autoradiography on brain sections from mice with inactivated GABRB3 or maternal UBE3A genes. Binding of GABA(A) receptor channel ([(35)S]t-butylbicyclophosphorothionate) and benzodiazepine ([(3)H]Ro 15-4513) site ligands was reduced in selected brain regions of the beta3-deficient mice as compared to controls, while the UBE3A-deficient mice failed to show reduced GABA(A) receptors. The results, suggesting two different pathophysiological mechanisms, are in agreement with positron emission tomography results from Angelman syndrome patients of the corresponding genetic backgrounds.

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PubMed2003

Genomic inversions of human chromosome 15q11-q13 in mothers of Angelman syndrome patients with class II (BP2/3) deletions.

Parental submicroscopic genomic inversions have recently been demonstrated to be present in several genomic disorders. These inversions are genomic polymorphisms that facilitate misalignment and abnormal recombination between flanking segmental duplications. Angelman syndrome (AS; MIM 105830) is associated with specific abnormalities of chromosome 15q11-q13, with about 70% of cases being mother-of-origin 4 Mb deletions. We present here evidence that some mothers of AS patients with deletions of the 15q11-q13 region have a heterozygous inversion involving the region that is deleted in the affected offspring. The inversion was detected in the mothers of four of six AS cases with the breakpoint 2-3 (BP2/3) 15q11-q13 deletion, but not in seven mothers of AS due to paternal uniparental disomy (UPD) 15. We have identified variable inversion breakpoints within BP segmental duplications in the inverted AS mothers, as well as in AS deleted patients. Interestingly, the BP2-BP3 region is inverted in the mouse draft genome sequence with respect to the human draft sequence. The BP2-BP3 chromosome 15q11-q13 inversion was detected in four of 44 subjects (9%) of the general population (P<0.004). The BP2/3 inversion should be an intermediate estate that facilitates the occurrence of 15q11-q13 BP2/3 deletions in the offspring.

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