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Genetics has proven to be a powerful approach in neurodegenerative diseases research, resulting in the identification of numerous causal and risk variants. Previously, we introduced the NeuroX Illumina genotyping array, a fast and efficient genotyping platform designed for the investigation of genetic variation in neurodegenerative diseases. Here, we present its updated version, named NeuroChip. The NeuroChip is a low-cost, custom-designed array containing a tagging variant backbone of about 306,670 variants complemented with a manually curated custom content comprised of 179,467 variants implicated in diverse neurological diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Lewy body dementia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, frontotemporal dementia, progressive supranuclear palsy, corticobasal degeneration, and multiple system atrophy. The tagging backbone was chosen because of the low cost and good genome-wide resolution; the custom content can be combined with other backbones, like population or drug development arrays. Using the NeuroChip, we can accurately identify rare variants and impute over 5.3 million common SNPs from the latest release of the Haplotype Reference Consortium. In summary, we describe the design and usage of the NeuroChip array and show its capability for detecting rare pathogenic variants in numerous neurodegenerative diseases. The NeuroChip has a more comprehensive and improved content, which makes it a reliable, high-throughput, cost-effective screening tool for genetic research and molecular diagnostics in neurodegenerative diseases., (Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Mutations in TMEM230 have recently been associated to Parkinson's disease (PD). To further understand the role of this gene in the Caucasian population, we interrogated our large repository of next generation sequencing data from unrelated PD cases and controls, as well as multiplex families with autosomal dominant PD. We identified 2 heterozygous missense variants in 2 unrelated PD cases and not in our control database (p.Y106H and p.I162V), and a heterozygous missense variant in 2 PD cases from the same family (p.A163T). However, data presented herein is not sufficient to support the role of any of these variants in PD pathology. A series of unified sequence kernel association tests also failed to show a cumulative effect of rare variation in this gene on the risk of PD in the general Caucasian population. Further evaluation of genetic data from different populations is needed to understand the genetic role of TMEM230 in PD etiology., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

It is known that Alzheimer's disease (AD) presents at an early age in people with Down syndrome (DS). The trisomy 21 in DS provides an opportunity to study the effect of duplicated genes in AD. APP and BACE2 are 2 genes located in chromosome 21 and related to AD. We looked into our cohort of 67 DS cases with dementia for the effect of BACE2 variants in age of onset of dementia. Of the 83 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), 6 were associated with age of onset and another 8 SNPs were borderline associated. Our finding also replicated a previous study showing association of rs2252576 with AD., (Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

An intronic expansion of a hexanucleotide GGGGCC repeat in the C9ORF72 gene has recently been shown to be an important cause of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in familial and sporadic cases. The frequency has only been defined in a small number of populations where the highest sporadic rate was identified in Finland (21.1%) and the lowest in mainland Italy (4.1%). We examined the C9ORF72 expansion in a series of 146 Greek ALS cases, 10.95% (n = 16) of cases carried the pathological expansion defined as greater than 30 repeats. In the 10 familial ALS probands, 50% (n = 5) of them carried a pathologically large expansion. In the remaining 136 sporadic ALS cases, 11 were carriers (8.2%). None of the 228 Greek controls carried an expanded repeat. The phenotype of our cases was spinal (13/16) or bulbar (3/16) ALS, the familial cases were all spinal ALS and none of our cases had behavioral frontotemporal dementia. Expansions in the C9ORF72 gene therefore represent a common cause of ALS in Greece and this test will be diagnostically very important to implement in the Greek population. The frequency is higher than other populations with the exception of Finland and this may be due to Greece being a relatively isolated population., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)