Abstract
Müllerian anomaly (M.A.) is a group of congenital anatomic abnormalities caused by aberrations of the development process of the Müllerian duct. M.A. can either be isolated or be involved in Mendelian syndromes, such as Dandy-Walker syndrome, Holt–Oram syndrome and Bardet–Biedl syndrome, which are often associated with both uterus and kidney malformations. In this study, we applied a genotype-first approach to analyze the whole-exome sequencing data of 492 patients with M.A. Six potential pathogenic variants were found in five genes previously related to female urogenital deformities (PKD1, SON, SALL1, BMPR1B, ITGA8), which are partially overlapping with our patients’ phenotypes. We further identified eight incidental findings in seven genes related to Mendelian syndromes without known association with reproductive anomalies (TEK, COL11A1, ANKRD11, LEMD3, DLG5, SPTB, BMP2), which represent potential phenotype expansions of these genes.
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Acknowledgements
We appreciate all of the patients, their families, and clinical research coordinators who participated in this project. We thank GeneSeeq Inc. for exome sequencing technical support. We thank Beijing Ekitech Co. Ltd. for the support in bioinformatics analyses.
Funding
This research was funded in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81822030 and 82072391 to N.W., 81930068 and 81772299 to Z.W., 81972132 to G.Q., 81972037 to J.Z., and 81830043 to Z.L.), National Science Foundation for Youth grant no. 81801401 (to C.N.), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (JQ20032 to N.W. and 7191007 to Z.W.), Capital’s Funds for Health Improvement and Research (2020-4-40114 to N.W.), Tsinghua University-Peking Union Medical College Hospital Initiative Scientific Research Program, CAMS Innovation Fund for Medical Sciences (CIFMS, 2020-I2M-C&T-B-030 to J.Z., 2020-I2M-C&T-A-015 to Y.M., and CAMS-2017-I2M-1-002 to L.Z.), and Non-profit Central Research Institute Fund of Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (No. 2019PT320025).
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Conceptualization: N.W. and L.Z. Cohort enrollment: N.C., W.T., H.P., C.M., Z.L., S.S., Y.Y., Y.N., X.L., L.Z., Z.C., J.L., and J.D. Funding acquisition: N.W., Z.L., J.Z., G.Q., and Z.W. Genetic data analysis: S.Z. and N.W. Bioinformatics analysis: S.Z. and H.Z. Writing - review & editing: N.W. and L.Z. Writing original draft: W.T., S.Z., N.C., L.Z., and N.W. All authors provided crucial input on several iterations of the manuscript, and all authors have approved the final version.
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Approval for the study was obtained from the ethics committee at Peking Union Medical College Hospital (ZS-1858, S-452).
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Tian, W., Chen, N., Ye, Y. et al. A genotype-first analysis in a cohort of Mullerian anomaly. J Hum Genet 67, 347–352 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s10038-021-00996-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s10038-021-00996-w
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