Emerging Role of in Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Brain Development.

Ornithine decarboxylase 1 ( gene) has been linked through gain-of-function variants to a rare disease featuring developmental delay, alopecia, macrocephaly, and structural brain anomalies. has been linked to additional diseases like cancer, with growing evidence for neurological contributions to schizophrenia, mood disorders, anxiety, epilepsy, learning, and suicidal behavior. The evidence of connection to neural disorders highlights the need for a systematic analysis of genotype-to-phenotype associations. An analysis of variants from ClinVar, Geno2MP, TOPMed, gnomAD, and COSMIC revealed an intellectual disability and seizure connected loss-of-function variant, ODC G84R (rs138359527, NC_000002.12:g.10444500C > T). The missense variant is found in ~1% of South Asian individuals and results in 2.5-fold decrease in enzyme function. Expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) reveal multiple functionally annotated, non-coding variants regulating that associate with psychiatric/neurological phenotypes. Further dissection of RNA-Seq during fetal brain development and within cerebral organoids showed an association of expression with cell proliferation of neural progenitor cells, suggesting gain-of-function variants with neural over-proliferation and loss-of-function variants with neural depletion. The linkage from the expression data of in early neural progenitor proliferation to phenotypes of neurodevelopmental delay and to the connection of polyamine metabolites in brain function establish as a bona fide neurodevelopmental disorder gene.