E-Poster Presentation 30th Australian and New Zealand Bone and Mineral Society Annual Scientific Meeting 2020

Deletion of the non-coding exon 1 in AMER1 causes osteopathia striata with cranial sclerosis (#122)

Jingyi Mi 1 , Padmini Parthasarathy 1 , Benjamin J Halliday 1 , Tim Morgan 1 , John Dean 2 , Malgorzata JM Nowaczyk 3 , David Markie 1 , Stephen P Robertson 1 , Emma M Wade 1
  1. University of Otago, Dunedin, OTAGO, New Zealand
  2. North of Scotland Regional Genetics Service, NHS Grampian, Aberdeen, Scotland
  3. Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Osteopathia striata with cranial sclerosis (OSCS) is an X-linked dominant condition characterised by metaphyseal striations, macrocephaly, cleft palate and developmental delay in affected females. Males have a more severe phenotype with multi-organ malformations, and rarely survive. To date, only frameshift and nonsense variants in the single coding exon of AMER1, or whole gene deletions have been reported to cause OSCS. In this study, we describe two families with phenotypic features typical of OSCS. Exome sequencing and multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification (MLPA) did not identify pathogenic variants in AMER1. Therefore genome sequencing was employed which identified two deletions containing the non-coding exon 1 of AMER1 in the families. These families highlight the importance of considering variants or deletions of upstream non-coding exons in conditions such as OSCS, noting that often such exons are not captured on probe or enrichment based platforms because of their high G/C content.