Evidence for an association between nonsyndromic cleft lip with or without cleft palate and a gene located on the long arm of chromosome 4.

Recent studies suggest that the familial aggregation of nonsyndromic cleft lip with or without cleft palate (CL +/- P) is likely to be attributable to the effects of several susceptibility loci, acting in a multiplicative fashion. Two potential CL +/- P susceptibility loci (CSL), transforming growth factor alpha (TGFA) and retinoic acid receptor (RARA), have been identified through association studies. In addition, recent evidence of linkage between CL +/- P and two markers (D4S175 and D4S192) in the region 4q25-4q31.3 raised the possibility that a CSL, with a larger effect than either TGFA or RARA, may reside within this region of the human genome. The present analyses were undertaken to determine whether D4S175 or D4S192 is significantly associated with CL +/- P in a sample of unrelated patients that have previously provided evidence of associations between CL +/- P and both TGFA and RARA. The results of these analyses provide further, tentative, evidence for the presence of a CSL locus on the long arm of chromosome 4 and help to refine the location of this locus in the region of D4S175 and D4S192.