Rett Syndrome like phenotypes in the R255X Mecp2 mutant mouse are rescued by MECP2 transgene

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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.

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Common polymorphisms in WNT10A affect tooth morphology as well as hair shape

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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.

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Epistasis Constrains Mutational Pathways of Hemoglobin Adaptation in High-Altitude Pikas

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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.

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