No evidence for transmission disequilibrium between a new marker at the myelin basic protein locus and multiple sclerosis in French patients

Abstract

The myelin basic protein (MBP) gene is a candidate locus for susceptibility to multiple sclerosis. Several groups have tested a complex (TGGA)_n repeat in the 5′ region of this gene for association/linkage with multiple sclerosis, with divergent results. This region of tandem repetitive sequence has been subjected to complex rearrangements, and there is a possibility that alleles of the same size have different internal structures, which reduces the interest of this marker for linkage disequilibrium studies and may at least partly explain the conflicting results obtained so far. To overcome this problem, we isolated a new polymorphic (CA)_n repeat within the Golli-MBP locus. The limited number of alleles identified makes this other marker suitable for transmission disequilibrium studies. We tested this marker for linkage with multiple sclerosis, using the transmission-disequilibrium test (TDT) on a sample of 196 nuclear families in which the genotypes of both parents could be unambiguously defined. We found no evidence of transmission disequilibrium between multiple sclerosis and any of the three alleles of this marker, even when the patients were subdivided according to their HLA-DRB1*1501 status. The present data thus provide no evidence for a contribution of the MBP gene to multiple sclerosis susceptibility in French patients.