Genetic analysis of polymorphisms in the kalirin gene for association with age-at-onset in European Huntington disease patients

BMC Medical Genetics

Research Article

Anne S Soehn¹  Huu Phuc Nguyen¹  Yu-Chun Tsai¹  Olaf Riess¹  Silke Metzger¹ 

[1] Department of Medical Genetics, University of Tuebingen, Calwerstr 7, 72076, Tuebingen, Germany;

关键词: Genetic Modifier;    Huntington Disease;    Mutant Huntingtin;    Adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder;    Spine Plasticity;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2350-13-48

 received in 2011-10-17, accepted in 2012-06-21,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundHuntington disease (HD) is caused by an expanded CAG repeat in the HD gene. Although the length of the CAG repeat strongly correlates with the age-at-onset (AAO), AAO in HD individuals may differ dramatically in spite of similar expanded CAG repeat lengths. Additional genetic or environmental factors are thought to influence the disease onset. Several modifier genes have been discovered so far but they do not fully explain the variability of AAO in HD. To potentially identify a novel genetic modifier, we analyzed single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the kalirin (KALRN) gene. Kalirin is a protein crucially involved in spine plasticity and its interaction with huntingtin-associated protein-1 (HAP-1) and a potential protein dysfunction might contribute to spine pathogenesis in HD.MethodsThe selected SNPs were genotyped by polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) and association of SNPs with AAO was investigated with the framework of linear models in an analysis of variance and covariance.ResultsEleven SNPs in the kalirin gene were examined in an association study in European HD patients. The ten coding SNPs under investigation were monomorphic, whereas SNP rs10934657 in the promoter region showed a minor allele frequency >1%. An analysis of covariance together with the influence of the expanded HD allele was applied in 680 HD patients. SNP rs10934657 did not affect the AAO of the examined HD population.ConclusionsThe results did not reveal an association between the analyzed kalirin polymorphisms and the AAO in HD. However, it does not exclude other SNPs of the kalirin gene as susceptible genetic modifiers.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Tsai et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.