Biar Carina G, Pfeifer Cole, Carvill Gemma L, Calhoun Jeffrey D
Ken and Ruth Davee Department of Neurology, Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois.
bioRxiv. 2024 Jun 8:2024.06.07.597916. doi: 10.1101/2024.06.07.597916.
Efforts to resolve the functional impact of variants of uncertain significance (VUS) have lagged behind the identification of new VUS; as such, there is a critical need for scalable VUS resolution technologies. Computational variant effect predictors (VEPs), once trained, can predict pathogenicity for all missense variants in a gene, set of genes, or the exome. Existing tools have employed information on known pathogenic and benign variants throughout the genome to predict pathogenicity of VUS. We hypothesize that taking a gene-specific approach will improve pathogenicity prediction over globally-trained VEPs. We tested this hypothesis using the gene , whose loss of function results in tuberous sclerosis, a multisystem mTORopathy affecting about 1 in 6,000 individuals born in the United States. has been identified as a high-priority target for VUS resolution, with (1) well-characterized molecular and patient phenotypes associated with loss-of-function variants, and (2) more than 2,700 VUS already documented in ClinVar. We developed Tuberous sclerosis classifier to Resolve variants of Uncertain Significance in (TRUST), a machine learning model to predict pathogenicity of missense VUS. To test whether these predictions are accurate, we further introduce curated loci prime editing (cliPE) as an accessible strategy for performing scalable multiplexed assays of variant effect (MAVEs). Using cliPE, we tested the effects of more than 200 variants, including 106 VUS. It is highly likely this functional data alone would be sufficient to reclassify 92 VUS with most being reclassified as likely benign. We found that TRUST's classifications were correlated with the functional data, providing additional validation for the predictions. We provide our pathogenicity predictions and MAVE data to aid with VUS resolution. In the near future, we plan to host these data on a public website and deposit into relevant databases such as MAVEdb as a community resource. Ultimately, this study provides a framework to complete variant effect maps of and and adapt this approach to other mTORopathy genes.
解决意义未明变异(VUS)功能影响的工作落后于新VUS的识别;因此,迫切需要可扩展的VUS解析技术。计算变异效应预测器(VEP)一旦训练完成,就可以预测基因、一组基因或外显子中所有错义变异的致病性。现有工具利用全基因组中已知致病和良性变异的信息来预测VUS的致病性。我们假设采用基因特异性方法将比全局训练的VEP提高致病性预测能力。我们使用该基因来检验这一假设,其功能丧失会导致结节性硬化症,这是一种多系统mTOR病,在美国每6000名出生的个体中约有1人受影响。该基因已被确定为VUS解析的高优先级靶点,原因如下:(1)与功能丧失变异相关且特征明确的分子和患者表型;(2)ClinVar中已记录了超过2700个VUS。我们开发了结节性硬化症变异解析分类器(TRUST),这是一种用于预测该基因错义VUS致病性的机器学习模型。为了检验这些预测是否准确,我们进一步引入了经编辑的位点碱基编辑(cliPE),作为一种可用于进行可扩展的变异效应多重分析(MAVE)且易于使用的策略。利用cliPE,我们测试了200多个该基因变异体的效应,包括106个VUS。仅这些功能数据就极有可能足以重新分类92个VUS,其中大多数被重新分类为可能良性。我们发现TRUST的分类与功能数据相关,为这些预测提供了额外验证。我们提供致病性预测和MAVE数据以帮助解析VUS。在不久的将来,我们计划将这些数据发布在公共网站上,并存入相关数据库,如MAVEdb,作为社区资源。最终,本研究提供了一个框架,以完成该基因和其他基因的变异效应图谱,并将此方法应用于其他mTOR病相关基因。