Browsing by Author "Beaudet, Arthur L."

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    Lessons learned from additional research analyses of unsolved clinical exome cases
    (BioMed Central, 2017-03-21) Eldomery, Mohammad K.; Coban-Akdemir, Zeynep; Harel, Tamar; Rosenfeld, Jill A.; Gambin, Tomasz; Stray-Pedersen, Asbjørg; Küry, Sébastien; Mercier, Sandra; Lessel, Davor; Denecke, Jonas; Wiszniewski, Wojciech; Penney, Samantha; Liu, Pengfei; Bi, Weimin; Lalani, Seema R.; Schaaf, Christian P.; Wangler, Michael F.; Bacino, Carlos A.; Lewis, Richard Alan; Potocki, Lorraine; Graham, Brett H.; Belmont, John W.; Scaglia, Fernando; Orange, Jordan S.; Jhangiani, Shalini N.; Chiang, Theodore; Doddapaneni, Harsha; Hu, Jianhong; Muzny, Donna M.; Xia, Fan; Beaudet, Arthur L.; Boerwinkle, Eric; Eng, Christine M.; Plon, Sharon E.; Sutton, V. Reid; Gibbs, Richard A.; Posey, Jennifer E.; Yang, Yaping; Lupski, James R.; Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, IU School of Medicine
    BACKGROUND: Given the rarity of most single-gene Mendelian disorders, concerted efforts of data exchange between clinical and scientific communities are critical to optimize molecular diagnosis and novel disease gene discovery. METHODS: We designed and implemented protocols for the study of cases for which a plausible molecular diagnosis was not achieved in a clinical genomics diagnostic laboratory (i.e. unsolved clinical exomes). Such cases were recruited to a research laboratory for further analyses, in order to potentially: (1) accelerate novel disease gene discovery; (2) increase the molecular diagnostic yield of whole exome sequencing (WES); and (3) gain insight into the genetic mechanisms of disease. Pilot project data included 74 families, consisting mostly of parent-offspring trios. Analyses performed on a research basis employed both WES from additional family members and complementary bioinformatics approaches and protocols. RESULTS: Analysis of all possible modes of Mendelian inheritance, focusing on both single nucleotide variants (SNV) and copy number variant (CNV) alleles, yielded a likely contributory variant in 36% (27/74) of cases. If one includes candidate genes with variants identified within a single family, a potential contributory variant was identified in a total of ~51% (38/74) of cases enrolled in this pilot study. The molecular diagnosis was achieved in 30/63 trios (47.6%). Besides this, the analysis workflow yielded evidence for pathogenic variants in disease-associated genes in 4/6 singleton cases (66.6%), 1/1 multiplex family involving three affected siblings, and 3/4 (75%) quartet families. Both the analytical pipeline and the collaborative efforts between the diagnostic and research laboratories provided insights that allowed recent disease gene discoveries (PURA, TANGO2, EMC1, GNB5, ATAD3A, and MIPEP) and increased the number of novel genes, defined in this study as genes identified in more than one family (DHX30 and EBF3). CONCLUSION: An efficient genomics pipeline in which clinical sequencing in a diagnostic laboratory is followed by the detailed reanalysis of unsolved cases in a research environment, supplemented with WES data from additional family members, and subject to adjuvant bioinformatics analyses including relaxed variant filtering parameters in informatics pipelines, can enhance the molecular diagnostic yield and provide mechanistic insights into Mendelian disorders. Implementing these approaches requires collaborative clinical molecular diagnostic and research efforts.
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    Validation Studies for Single Circulating Trophoblast Genetic Testing as a Form of Noninvasive Prenatal Diagnosis
    (Elsevier, 2019-12-05) Vossaert, Liesbeth; Wang, Qun; Salman, Roseen; McCombs, Anne K.; Patel, Vipulkumar; Qu, Chunjing; Mancini, Michael A.; Edwards, Dean P.; Malovannaya, Anna; Liu, Pengfei; Shaw, Chad A.; Levy, Brynn; Wapner, Ronald J.; Bi, Weimin; Breman, Amy M.; Van den Veyver, Ignatia B.; Beaudet, Arthur L.; Medical and Molecular Genetics, School of Medicine
    It has long been appreciated that genetic analysis of fetal or trophoblast cells in maternal blood could revolutionize prenatal diagnosis. We implemented a protocol for single circulating trophoblast (SCT) testing using positive selection by magnetic-activated cell sorting and single-cell low-coverage whole-genome sequencing to detect fetal aneuploidies and copy-number variants (CNVs) at ∼1 Mb resolution. In 95 validation cases, we identified on average 0.20 putative trophoblasts/mL, of which 55% were of high quality and scorable for both aneuploidy and CNVs. We emphasize the importance of analyzing individual cells because some cells are apoptotic, in S-phase, or otherwise of poor quality. When two or more high-quality trophoblast cells were available for singleton pregnancies, there was complete concordance between all trophoblasts unless there was evidence of confined placental mosaicism. SCT results were highly concordant with available clinical data from chorionic villus sampling (CVS) or amniocentesis procedures. Although determining the exact sensitivity and specificity will require more data, this study further supports the potential for SCT testing to become a diagnostic prenatal test.