Mendelian genes for Parkinson's disease contribute to the sporadic forms of the disease.

by: Nino Spataro, Francesc Calafell, Laura Cervera, Ferran Casals, Javier Pagonabarraga, Berta Pascual-Sedano, Antònia Campolongo, Jaime Kulisevsky, Alberto Lleó, Arcadi Navarro, Jordi Clarimón, Elena Bosch

Human molecular genetics (11 December 2014), doi:10.1093/hmg/ddu616  Key: citeulike:13462968

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) can be divided in familial (Mendelian) and sporadic forms. A number of causal genes have been discovered for the Mendelian form, which constitutes 10-20% of the total cases. Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have successfully uncovered a number of susceptibility loci for sporadic cases but those only explain a small fraction (6-7%) of PD heritability. It has been observed that some genes that confer susceptibility to PD through common risk variants also contain rare causing mutations for the Mendelian forms of the disease. These results suggest a possible functional link between Mendelian and sporadic PD and led us to investigate the role that rare and low-frequency variants could have on the sporadic form. Through a targeting approach, we have resequenced at 49X coverage the exons and regulatory regions of 38 genes (including Mendelian and susceptibility PD genes) in 249 sporadic PD patients and 145 unrelated controls of European origin. Unlike susceptibility genes, Mendelian genes show a clear general enrichment of rare functional variants in PD cases, observed directly as well as with Tajima's D statistic and several collapsing methods. Our findings suggest that rare variation on PD Mendelian genes may have a role in the sporadic forms of the disease. © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

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