Frontiers in Genetics

Main TextKonzo, a disease characterized by sudden, irreversible spastic paraparesis, affecting up to 10% of the population in some regions of Sub-Saharan Africa during outbreaks and is strongly associated with dietary exposure to cyanogenic bitter cassava. The molecular mechanisms underlying the development of konzo, remain largely unknown. Here, through an analysis of 16 individuals with konzo and matched healthy controls from the same outbreak zones, we identified 117 differentially methylated...

The manifestation of the COVID-19 varies from absence of symptoms to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. The epidemiological data indicate that infection and mortality rates are greater in European populations in comparison with eastern Asians. To test if epidemiological patterns may be partly determined by human genetic variation, we investigated, by exomic and databank analyses, the variability found in the TMPRSS2 gene in populations from different continents, since this gene is fundamental to...

The Roma are the most numerous ethnic minority in Europe. The Iberian Roma arrived in the Iberian Peninsula five centuries ago and still today, they keep a strong group identity. Demographic and cultural reasons lie behind a high rate of Mendelian disease often related to founder variants. We have analysed exome data from 119 Iberian Roma individuals collected from 2018 to 2020. A database of variant frequency has been implemented (IRPVS) and made available online. We have analysed the carrier r...

The clinical condition COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2, was declared a pandemic by the WHO in March 2020. Currently, there are more than 5 million cases worldwide, and the pandemic has increased exponentially in many countries, with different incidences and death rates among regions/ethnicities and, intriguingly, between sexes. In addition to the many factors that can influence these discrepancies, we suggest a biological aspect, the genetic variation at the viral S protein receptor in human cell...

BackgroundThe clinical presentation of COVID-19 has shown high variability between individuals, which is partly due to genetic factors. The OAS1/2/3 cluster was found to be strongly associated with COVID-19 severity. We aimed to examine this locus for the occurrence of the critical variant, rs10774671, and its respective haplotype blocks within the Moroccan population. MethodsThe frequency of SNPs at the cluster of OAS immunity genes was assessed from an in-house database in 157 unrelated indiv...

Here, we present a comprehensive genomic characterization of a cohort of 43,608 Emirati genomes sequenced as part of the Emirati Genome Program (EGP). This study identified more than 421 million single-nucleotide variants and indels and more than 600 million copy-number and structural variants. Small variants had 756 million molecular effects annotated. Of 7.7 million polymorphic variants having an allele frequency (AF) of more than 5% in EGP, 1,348 have a predicted deleterious effect on a prote...

BackgroundGenetic etiology is the main cause of non-obstructive azoospermia, but little is known about the landscape of the disease causative genes. ObjectiveTo identify the association of non-obstructive azoospermia and the putative causative genetic factors. Design, setting, and participantsA single-center perspective case-control study of 133 patients, with clinicopathologic non-obstructive azoospermia and 495 fertile men control was performed. Eleven trio families were available and enroll...

BackgroundPolycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is the most common endocrine disorder affecting women of reproductive age. Previous studies have identified genetic variants associated with PCOS identified by different diagnostic criteria. The Rotterdam Criteria is the broadest and able to identify the most PCOS cases. ObjectivesTo identify novel associated genetic variants, we extracted PCOS cases and controls from the electronic health records (EHR) based on the Rotterdam Criteria and performed a g...

In this study, we analyzed the potential associations of selected laboratory and anamnestic parameters, as well as 12 genetic polymorphisms (SNPs), with clinical COVID-19 occurrence and severity in 869 hospitalized patients. The SNPs analyzed by qPCR were selected based on population-wide genetic (GWAS) data previously indicating association with the severity of COVID-19. We confirmed the associations of disease with several clinical laboratory and anamnestic parameters and found an unexpected a...

Background and aimsCoffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world and has received considerable concerns regarding its impact on human health. Mendelian randomization (MR) could be valuable to explore the potential health effects of coffee via instrumental variables. In this study, we aim to identify novel genetic loci associated with habitual coffee consumption using genome-wide meta-analysis (GWMA) and to evaluate the broad impact of coffee consumption on human health and dis...

Early-onset severe preeclampsia (EO-PE) is a distinct and highly consequential form of preeclampsia (PE), presenting significant challenges for early detection. Here, we investigated the fragmentation pattern of plasma cell-free DNA (cfDNA) in EO-PE patients. We uncovered that the nucleotide composition at the 5 end (i.e. ends motif) of plasma cfDNA showed a unique pathological preference in EO-PE pregnancies and gestational-psychology preference in healthy pregnancies. By integrating 91 EO-PE s...

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is one of the most common metabolism and endocrine disorder affecting women of reproductive age. However, the genetic mechanisms of PCOS remain largely elusive. A transcriptome-wide association study(TWAS) was conducted to identify the genes associated with PCOS using gene expression references of the whole blood and ovary. Then mRNA expression profiling analysis was performed to identify common genes with TWAS. Genes detected by TWAS were subjected to Gene Ontol...

Duplications of dosage sensitive sex-locus Xp21.2 including NR0B1 have been linked to 46,XY gonadal dysgenesis (GD) and their effects are attributed merely to increase gene dosage of NR0B1 (DAX1). Here we present a general mechanism how deletions, duplications, triplications or inversions with or without NR0B1 at Xp21.2 can lead to partial or complete GD by disrupting the cognate topological associated domain (TAD) in the vincinity of NR0B1. Our model is supported by three unrelated patients: tw...

Trypsin is an important enzyme secreted by the pancreas for digesting proteins. The precursors of major human trypsin are encoded by trypsinogen genes PRSS1 and PRSS2. Here, we leveraged multi-omic data to study their evolutionary and functional impact. We estimated that the primate trypsinogen gene was duplicated from a single copy to multiple-copy 24-34 million years ago (Mya). Compared to six protein-coding genes in non-human great apes, the human ancestral state was a 5-copy with three being...

BackgroundCoronaviruses (CoV) are a large family of viruses that are common in people and many animal species. Animal coronaviruses rarely infect humans with the exceptions of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV), the Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), and now SARS-CoV-2, which is the cause of the ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Many studies suggested that genetic variants in ACE2 gene may influence the host susceptibility/resistance to ...

PurposeSARS-CoV-2 infects cells via the human Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) protein. The genetic variation of ACE2 function and expression across populations is still poorly understood. This study aims at better understanding the genetic basis of COVID-19 outcomes by studying association between genetic variation in ACE2 and disease severity in the Iranian population. MethodsWe analyzed two large Iranian cohorts and several publicly available human population variant databases to ident...

The mammary gland undergoes hormonally stimulated cycles of proliferation, lactation and involution. We hypothesized that these factors increase the mutational burden in glandular tissue and may explain high cancer incidence rate in the general population and recurrent disease. Hence, we investigated the DNA sequence variants in the normal mammary gland, tumor and peripheral blood from 52 reportedly sporadic breast cancer patients, including breast-conserving surgery cases. Targeted resequencing...

Current research on the angiotensin-converting-enzyme (ACE) gene has yielded controversial results on whether different ACE polymorphisms are linked with human longevity. ACE polymorphisms are a risk factor for Alzheimers disease and age-onset diseases that may contribute to the mortality of older people. Our goal is to consolidate existing studies with assistance from artificial intelligence and machine-learning-assisted software to come to a more precise understanding of the role of the ACE ge...

Half of the human genome is derived from Transposable Elements (TEs), among which Alu, LINE-1 and SVA are particularly represented. Germline transposition of TEs generates polymorphisms between individuals and may be used to study association with phenotypes and inter-individual differences. Italy presents an increased number of isolated villages compared to other European groups, and these isolates provide a desirable study subject to understand the genetic variability of the Italian peninsula....

Bleeding in early pregnancy and postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) bear substantial risks, with the former closely associated with pregnancy loss and the latter being the foremost cause of maternal death, underscoring the severity of these complications in maternal-fetal health. Here, we investigated the genetic variation underlying aspects of pregnancy-associated bleeding and identified five loci associated with PPH through a meta-analysis of 21,512 cases and 259,500 controls. Functional annotation an...