Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience (May 2023)

Genetic analysis of dystonia-related genes in Parkinson's disease

  • Yige Wang,
  • Yige Wang,
  • Yuwen Zhao,
  • Hongxu Pan,
  • Qian Zeng,
  • Xiaoxia Zhou,
  • Yaqin Xiang,
  • Zhou Zhou,
  • Qian Xu,
  • Qiying Sun,
  • Jieqiong Tan,
  • Xinxiang Yan,
  • Jinchen Li,
  • Jinchen Li,
  • Jinchen Li,
  • Jifeng Guo,
  • Jifeng Guo,
  • Jifeng Guo,
  • Jifeng Guo,
  • Beisha Tang,
  • Beisha Tang,
  • Beisha Tang,
  • Beisha Tang,
  • Qiao Yu,
  • Zhenhua Liu,
  • Zhenhua Liu,
  • Zhenhua Liu,
  • Zhenhua Liu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2023.1207114
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 15

Abstract

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ObjectiveParkinson's disease (PD) and dystonia are two closely related movement disorders with overlaps in clinical phenotype. Variants in several dystonia-related genes were demonstrated to be associated with PD; however, genetic evidence for the involvement of dystonia-related genes in PD has not been fully studied. Here, we comprehensively investigated the association between rare variants in dystonia-related genes and PD in a large Chinese cohort.MethodsWe comprehensively analyzed the rare variants of 47 known dystonia-related genes by mining the whole-exome sequencing (WES) and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data from 3,959 PD patients and 2,931 healthy controls. We initially identified potentially pathogenic variants of dystonia-related genes in patients with PD based on different inheritance models. Sequence kernel association tests were conducted in the next step to detect the association between the burden of rare variants and the risk for PD.ResultsWe found that five patients with PD carried potentially pathogenic biallelic variants in recessive dystonia-related genes including COL6A3 and TH. Additionally, we identified 180 deleterious variants in dominant dystonia-related genes based on computational pathogenicity predictions and four of which were considered as potentially pathogenic variants (p.W591X and p.G820S in ANO3, p.R678H in ADCY5, and p.R458Q in SLC2A1). A gene-based burden analysis revealed the increased burden of variant subgroups of TH, SQSTM1, THAP1, and ADCY5 in sporadic early-onset PD, whereas COL6A3 was associated with sporadic late-onset PD. However, none of them reached statistical significance after the Bonferroni correction.ConclusionOur findings indicated that rare variants in several dystonia-related genes are suggestively associated with PD, and taken together, the role of COL6A3 and TH genes in PD is highlighted.

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