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Background: Dupuytren's disease is a benign fibromatosis of the hands and fingers that leads to flexion contractures. We hypothesized that multiple genetic and environmental factors influence susceptibility to this disease and sought to identify susceptibility genes to better understand its pathogenesis. Methods: We conducted a genomewide association study of 960 Dutch persons with Dupuytren's disease and 3117 controls (the discovery set) to test for association between the disease and genetic markers. We tested the 35 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) most strongly associated with Dupuytren's disease (P<1×10−4) in the discovery set in three additional, independent case series comprising a total of 1365 affected persons and 8445 controls from Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Results: Initially, we observed a significant genomewide association between Dupuytren's disease and 8 SNPs at three loci. Tests of replication and joint analysis of all data from 2325 patients with Dupuytren's disease and 11,562 controls yielded an association with 11 SNPs from nine different loci (P<5.0×10−8). Six of these loci contain genes known to be involved in the Wnt-signaling pathway: WNT4 (rs7524102) (P=2.8×10−9; odds ratio, 1.28), SFRP4 (rs16879765) (P=5.6×10−39; odds ratio, 1.98), WNT2 (rs4730775) (P=3.0×10−8; odds ratio, 0.83), RSPO2 (rs611744) (P=7.9×10−15; odds ratio, 0.75), SULF1 (rs2912522) (P=2.0×10−13; odds ratio, 0.72), and WNT7B (rs6519955) (P=3.2×10−33; odds ratio, 1.54). Conclusions: This study implicates nine different loci involved in genetic susceptibility to Dupuytren's disease. The fact that six of these nine loci harbor genes encoding proteins in the Wnt-signaling pathway suggests that aberrations in this pathway are key to the process of fibromatosis in Dupuytren's disease. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Rapid and reliable identification of deleterious changes in the breast cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 has become one of the major issues in most DNA services laboratories. To rapidly detect all possible changes within the coding and splice site determining sequences of the breast cancer genes, we established a semiautomated denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) mutation scanning system. All exons of both genes are covered by the DGGE scan, comprising 120 amplicons. We use a semiautomated approach, amplifying all individual amplicons with the same PCR program, after which the amplicons are pooled. DGGE is performed using three slightly different gel conditions. Validation was performed using DNA samples with known sequence variants in 107 of the 120 amplicons; all variants were detected. This DGGE mutation scanning, in combination with a PCR test for two Dutch founder deletions in BRCA1 was then applied in 431 families in which 52 deleterious changes and 70 unclassified variants were found. Fifteen unclassified variants were not reported before. The system was easily adopted by five other laboratories, where in another 3,593 families both exons 11 were analyzed by the protein truncation test (PTT) and the remaining exons by DGGE. In total, a deleterious change (nonsense, frameshift, splice-site mutation, or large deletion) was found in 661 families (16.4%), 462 in BRCA1 (11.5%), 197 in BRCA2 (4.9%), and in two index cases a deleterious change in both BRCA1 and BRCA2 was identified. Eleven deleterious changes in BRCA1 and 36 in BRCA2 had not been reported before. In conclusion, this DGGE mutation screening method for BRCA1 and BRCA2 is proven to be highly sensitive and is easy to adopt, which makes screening of large numbers of patients feasible. The results of screening of BRCA1 and BRCA2 in more than 4,000 families present a valuable overview of mutations in the Dutch population., (Copyright 2006 Wiley-Liss, Inc.)