Research Laboratories Coordination Unit, Fondazione IRCCS Ca' Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, Milan, Italy.
Medical Genetics Unit, Department of Health Sciences, Università Degli Studi Di Milano, Milan, Italy.
Genes Genomics. 2023 May;45(5):637-655. doi: 10.1007/s13258-022-01341-x. Epub 2022 Dec 1.
BACKGROUND: Whole-Exome Sequencing (WES) is a valuable tool for the molecular diagnosis of patients with a suspected genetic condition. In complex and heterogeneous diseases, the interpretation of WES variants is more challenging given the absence of diagnostic handles and other reported cases with overlapping clinical presentations. OBJECTIVE: To describe candidate variants emerging from trio-WES and possibly associated with the clinical phenotype in clinically heterogeneous conditions. METHODS: We performed WES in ten patients from eight families, selected because of the lack of a clear clinical diagnosis or suspicion, the presence of multiple clinical signs, and the negative results of traditional genetic tests. RESULTS: Although we identified ten candidate variants, reaching the diagnosis of these cases is challenging, given the complexity and the rarity of these syndromes and because affected genes are already associated with known genetic diseases only partially recapitulating patients' phenotypes. However, the identification of these variants could shed light into the definition of new genotype-phenotype correlations. Here, we describe the clinical and molecular data of these cases with the aim of favoring the match with other similar cases and, hopefully, confirm our diagnostic hypotheses. CONCLUSION: This study emphasizes the major limitations associated with WES data interpretation, but also highlights its clinical utility in unraveling novel genotype-phenotype correlations in complex and heterogeneous undefined clinical conditions with a suspected genetic etiology.
背景:全外显子组测序(WES)是一种有价值的工具,可用于疑似遗传疾病患者的分子诊断。在复杂和异质性疾病中,由于缺乏诊断线索和其他具有重叠临床表现的报道病例,WES 变体的解释更具挑战性。
目的:描述来自 trio-WES 的候选变体,并可能与临床表型相关,这些表型在临床异质性疾病中。
方法:我们对来自八个家庭的十名患者进行了 WES 检测,这些患者选择的原因是缺乏明确的临床诊断或怀疑、存在多种临床体征和传统遗传检测的阴性结果。
结果:尽管我们确定了十个候选变体,但由于这些综合征的复杂性和罕见性,以及受影响的基因已经与仅部分再现患者表型的已知遗传疾病相关联,因此诊断这些病例具有挑战性。然而,这些变体的鉴定可以阐明新的基因型-表型相关性的定义。在这里,我们描述了这些病例的临床和分子数据,旨在促进与其他类似病例的匹配,并希望证实我们的诊断假设。
结论:这项研究强调了与 WES 数据分析相关的主要局限性,但也突出了其在复杂和异质性定义不明确的具有疑似遗传病因的临床情况下,揭示新的基因型-表型相关性的临床实用性。
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