Rett syndrome is a severe neurodevelopmental disorder that is usually caused by mutations in Methyl-CpG-binding Protein 2 (MECP2). Four of the eight common disease causing mutations in MECP2 are nonsense mutations and are responsible for over 35% of all cases of RTT. A strategy to overcome disease-causing nonsense mutations is treatment with nonsense mutation suppressing drugs that allow expression of full length proteins from mutated genes with premature in-frame stop codons.
Month: January 2015
Common polymorphisms in WNT10A affect tooth morphology as well as hair shape
Hair and teeth are appendages of ectodermal origin, and there are common molecular backgrounds involved in their formation. To date, it has been revealed that a nonsynonymous polymorphism in EDAR has effects on the morphological variation in both hair and teeth. Previous association studies have confirmed that single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in/near THADA, FRAS1, WNT10A, NAF1 and FGFR2 are associated with hair morphology.
Epistasis Constrains Mutational Pathways of Hemoglobin Adaptation in High-Altitude Pikas
A fundamental question in evolutionary genetics concerns the roles of mutational pleiotropy and epistasis in shaping trajectories of protein evolution. This question can be addressed most directly by using site-directed mutagenesis to explore the mutational landscape of protein function in experimentally defined regions of sequence space.
Coding variants in TREM2 increase risk for Alzheimer’s disease
The triggering receptor expressed on myeloid 2 (TREM2) is an immune phagocytic receptor expressed on brain microglia known to trigger phagocytosis and regulate the inflammatory response. Homozygous mutations in TREM2 cause Nasu–Hakola disease, a rare recessive form of dementia.