Autor: |
Francesca Antonaros, Margherita Pitocco, Domenico Abete, Beatrice Vione, Allison Piovesan, Lorenza Vitale, Pierluigi Strippoli, Maria Caracausi, Maria Chiara Pelleri |
Jazyk: |
angličtina |
Rok vydání: |
2021 |
Předmět: |
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Zdroj: |
Frontiers in Genetics, Vol 12 (2021) |
Druh dokumentu: |
article |
ISSN: |
1664-8021 |
DOI: |
10.3389/fgene.2021.770359 |
Popis: |
Down syndrome (DS) is caused by trisomy of chromosome 21 and it is the most common genetic cause of intellectual disability (ID) in humans. Subjects with DS show a typical phenotype marked by facial dysmorphisms and ID. Partial trisomy 21 (PT21) is a rare genotype characterized by the duplication of a delimited chromosome 21 (Hsa21) portion and it may or may not be associated with DS diagnosis. The highly restricted Down syndrome critical region (HR-DSCR) is a region of Hsa21 present in three copies in all individuals with PT21 and a diagnosis of DS. This region, located on distal 21q22.13, is 34 kbp long and does not include characterized genes. The HR-DSCR is annotated as an intergenic region between KCNJ6-201 transcript encoding for potassium inwardly rectifying channel subfamily J member 6 and DSCR4-201 transcript encoding Down syndrome critical region 4. Two transcripts recently identified by massive RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq) and automatically annotated on Ensembl database reveal that the HR-DSCR seems to be partially crossed by KCNJ6-202 and DSCR4-202 isoforms. KCNJ6-202 shares the coding sequence with KCNJ6-201 which is involved in many physiological processes, including heart rate in cardiac cells and circuit activity in neuronal cells. DSCR4-202 transcript has the first two exons in common with DSCR4-201, the only experimentally verified gene uniquely present in Hominidae. In this study, we performed in silico and in vitro analyses of the HR-DSCR. Bioinformatic data, obtained using Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and SRA-BLAST software, were confirmed by Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and Sanger sequencing on a panel of human tissues. Our data demonstrate that the HR-DSCR cannot be defined as an intergenic region. Further studies are needed to investigate the functional role of the new transcripts, likely involved in DS phenotypes. |
Databáze: |
Directory of Open Access Journals |
Externí odkaz: |
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