Back

Impaired gephyrin G-domain trimerization and phase separation in a patient with developmental epileptic encephalopathy

Bruckisch, E. H. W.; de Melo Aragao, M.; dos Santos Rhode, T.; Huber, A.-K.; de Oliveira Torres, M.; Schwarz, G.; Liebsch, F.

2026-01-09 neuroscience
10.64898/2026.01.09.698633 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Epilepsy, a common neurological disorder is frequently linked to genetic variants in synaptic proteins. Here, we describe a de novo pathogenic missense variant in the gephyrin G-domain (G134R) identified in an epileptic patient with developmental delay and seizures. Functional analyses reveal that G134R disrupts higher-order oligomerization, leading to impaired liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) and synaptic clustering. Recombinant G134R-gephyrin variant forms lower oligomers with reduced molybdenum cofactor (Moco) synthesis. In non-neuronal cells, G134R fails to oligomerize beyond dimers and loses Moco synthesis function. In neurons, G134R is unable to form synaptic clusters and exerts a dominant-negative effect on WT-gephyrin, severely disrupting inhibitory synapse formation. Our findings highlight a critical role for the G-domain in gephyrin self-assembly and LLPS, shifting the focus from the E-domain-centric view of gephyrin function and providing a novel molecular mechanism for epilepsy linked to G-domain mutations.

Published in EMBO Molecular Medicine (predicted rank #30) · training set

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.