eDiVA-Classification and prioritization of pathogenic variants for clinical diagnostics.

Mendelian diseases have shown to be an and efficient model for connecting genotypes to phenotypes and for elucidating the function of genes. Whole-exome sequencing (WES) accelerated the study of rare Mendelian diseases in families, allowing for directly pinpointing rare causal mutations in genic regions without the need for linkage analysis. However, the low diagnostic rates of 20-30% reported for multiple WES disease studies point to the need for improved variant pathogenicity classification and causal variant prioritization methods. Here, we present the exome Disease Variant Analysis (eDiVA; http://ediva.crg.eu), an automated computational framework for identification of causal genetic variants (coding/splicing single-nucleotide variants and small insertions and deletions) for rare diseases using WES of families or parent-child trios. eDiVA combines next-generation sequencing data analysis, comprehensive functional annotation, and causal variant prioritization optimized for familial genetic disease studies. eDiVA features a machine learning-based variant pathogenicity predictor combining various genomic and evolutionary signatures. Clinical information, such as disease phenotype or mode of inheritance, is incorporated to improve the precision of the prioritization algorithm. Benchmarking against state-of-the-art competitors demonstrates that eDiVA consistently performed as a good or better than existing approach in terms of detection rate and precision. Moreover, we applied eDiVA to several familial disease cases to demonstrate its clinical applicability.

Severe neurocognitive and growth disorders due to variation in THOC2, an essential component of nuclear mRNA export machinery.

Highly conserved TREX-mediated mRNA export is emerging as a key pathway in neuronal development and differentiation. TREX subunit variants cause neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) by interfering with mRNA export from the cell nucleus to the cytoplasm. Previously we implicated four missense variants in the X-linked THOC2 gene in intellectual disability (ID). We now report an additional six affected individuals from five unrelated families with two de novo and three maternally inherited pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants in THOC2 extending the genotypic and phenotypic spectrum. These comprise three rare missense THOC2 variants that affect evolutionarily conserved amino acid residues and reduce protein stability and two with canonical splice-site THOC2 variants that result in C-terminally truncated THOC2 proteins. We present detailed clinical assessment and functional studies on a de novo variant in a female with an epileptic encephalopathy and discuss an additional four families with rare variants in THOC2 with supportive evidence for pathogenicity. Severe neurocognitive features, including movement and seizure disorders, were observed in this cohort. Taken together our data show that even subtle alterations to the canonical molecular pathways such as mRNA export, otherwise essential for cellular life, can be compatible with life, but lead to NDDs in humans.