Browsing by Subject "monogenic disease"

Skeletal dysplasias are a group of rare monogenic bone disorders affecting joints and the skeleton. An increasing number of gene defects have been associated with skeletal dysplasias, but many cases remain without a known cause or a clear diagnosis. Exome sequencing data of the family with two siblings affected with an undiagnosed type of bone dysplasia was examined in this study with the aim of determining the genetic cause behind the phenotype. The causal variant was assumed to be in a novel disease-causing gene, since a previously performed gene panel of skeletal disease-causing genes had not revealed any positive results. The search for potential rare pathogenic variants in genes linked to the skeleton was done with VarAFT filtering software. The search revealed a short list of candidate variants confirmed first with Broad Institute’s Integrative Genomics Viewer (IGV) and then with targeted Sanger sequencing. Conservation analysis on the affected amino acids, in silico functional analysis on the variants and a comprehensive literature review on all candidate genes were performed to evaluate the likelihood of them being the variant behind the phenotype. A shortlist of three genes were obtained with the analyses, with one of them seeming to be the most likely candidate. However, to assuredly identify the disease-causing variant, further testing should be performed. Functional analyses should be done to test the functions of the proteins encoded by the candidate genes and the consequences of the pathogenic variants.