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Deficits in the basal ganglia pathways modulating cortical motor activity underlie both Parkinson disease (PD) and Huntington disease (HD). Phosphodiesterase 10A (PDE10A) is enriched in the striatum, and animal data suggest that it is a key regulator of this circuitry. Here, we report on germline PDE10A mutations in eight individuals from two families affected by a hyperkinetic movement disorder due to homozygous mutations c.320A>G (p.Tyr107Cys) and c.346G>C (p.Ala116Pro). Both mutations lead to a reduction in PDE10A levels in recombinant cellular systems, and critically, positron-emission-tomography (PET) studies with a specific PDE10A ligand confirmed that the p.Tyr107Cys variant also reduced striatal PDE10A levels in one of the affected individuals. A knock-in mouse model carrying the homologous p.Tyr97Cys variant had decreased striatal PDE10A and also displayed motor abnormalities. Striatal preparations from this animal had an impaired capacity to degrade cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) and a blunted pharmacological response to PDE10A inhibitors. These observations highlight the critical role of PDE10A in motor control across species., (Copyright © 2016 The American Society of Human Genetics. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

A diverse family of cytoskeletal dynein motors powers various cellular transport systems, including axonemal dyneins generating the force for ciliary and flagellar beating essential to movement of extracellular fluids and of cells through fluid. Multisubunit outer dynein arm (ODA) motor complexes, produced and preassembled in the cytosol, are transported to the ciliary or flagellar compartment and anchored into the axonemal microtubular scaffold via the ODA docking complex (ODA-DC) system. In humans, defects in ODA assembly are the major cause of primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD), an inherited disorder of ciliary and flagellar dysmotility characterized by chronic upper and lower respiratory infections and defects in laterality. Here, by combined high-throughput mapping and sequencing, we identified CCDC151 loss-of-function mutations in five affected individuals from three independent families whose cilia showed a complete loss of ODAs and severely impaired ciliary beating. Consistent with the laterality defects observed in these individuals, we found Ccdc151 expressed in vertebrate left-right organizers. Homozygous zebrafish ccdc151(ts272a) and mouse Ccdc151(Snbl) mutants display a spectrum of situs defects associated with complex heart defects. We demonstrate that CCDC151 encodes an axonemal coiled coil protein, mutations in which abolish assembly of CCDC151 into respiratory cilia and cause a failure in axonemal assembly of the ODA component DNAH5 and the ODA-DC-associated components CCDC114 and ARMC4. CCDC151-deficient zebrafish, planaria, and mice also display ciliary dysmotility accompanied by ODA loss. Furthermore, CCDC151 coimmunoprecipitates CCDC114 and thus appears to be a highly evolutionarily conserved ODA-DC-related protein involved in mediating assembly of both ODAs and their axonemal docking machinery onto ciliary microtubules., (Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Current methods for sequencing clonal populations of DNA molecules yield several gigabases of data per day, typically comprising reads of < 100 nt. Such datasets permit widespread genome resequencing and transcriptome analysis or other quantitative tasks. However, this huge capacity can also be harnessed for the resequencing of smaller (gene-sized) target regions, through the simultaneous parallel analysis of multiple subjects, using sample "tagging" or "indexing". These methods promise to have a huge impact on diagnostic mutation analysis and candidate gene testing. Here we describe a software package developed for such studies, offering the ability to resolve pooled samples carrying barcode tags and to align reads to a reference sequence using a mutation-tolerant process. The program, Illuminator, can identify rare sequence variants, including insertions and deletions, and permits interactive data analysis on standard desktop computers. It facilitates the effective analysis of targeted clonal sequencer data without dedicated computational infrastructure or specialized training., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Objective: Homozygous recessive germline mutations of the 15-hydroxyprostaglandin dehydrogenase (HPGD) gene, encoding 15-hydroxyprostaglandin dehydrogenase, result in persistent elevation of circulating PGE(2) levels, causing the syndrome of primary hypertrophic osteoarthropathy (PHO). Homozygous HPGD mutations have so far been reported in 10 families, all but one displaying parental consanguinity. Only two of these families were of European origin. We wished to determine the role of HPGD in causing PHO in non-consanguineous European families., Methods: Five previously unreported families of Caucasian European origin, with one or more individuals affected with typical PHO, were characterized clinically and by complete sequencing of the HPGD coding exons., Results: Biallelic HPGD mutations were identified in affected individuals in all the five families, confirming a very specific association of this phenotype with HPGD mutations. The previously described c.175&#95;176delCT frameshift mutation was observed in association with two different alleles of an adjacent single nucleotide polymorphism., Conclusions: Biallelic HPGD mutations are found in the majority of patients with typical PHO, and sequencing of the HPGD gene is a highly specific first-line investigation for patients presenting in this way, particularly during childhood. The c.175&#95;176delCT frameshift mutation appears to be recurrent and to be the commonest HPGD mutation in Caucasian families.