Genetic aetiologies for childhood speech disorder: novel pathways co-expressed during brain development

作者：Antony Kaspi, Michael S. Hildebrand, Victoria E. Jackson, Ruth Braden, Olivia van Reyk, Tegan Howell, Simone Debono, Mariana Lauretta, Lottie D. Morison, Matthew Coleman, Richard Webster, David Coman, Himanshu Goel, Mathew Wallis, Gabriel Dabscheck, Lilian Downie, Emma K. Baker, Bronwyn Parry‐Fielder, Kirrie J. Ballard, Eva Harrold, Shaun Ziegenfusz, Mark F. Bennett, Erandee Robertson, Longfei Wang, Amber Boys, Simon E. Fisher, David J. Amor, Ingrid E. Scheffer, Melanie Bahlo, Angela Morgan · 发表于：Molecular Psychiatry · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.1038/s41380-022-01764-8 · 被引用次数：34 · 研究领域：Language Development and Disorders、Genetics and Neurodevelopmental Disorders、Congenital heart defects research

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), the prototypic severe childhood speech disorder, is characterized by motor programming and planning deficits. Genetic factors make substantive contributions to CAS aetiology, with a monogenic pathogenic variant identified in a third of cases, implicating around 20 single genes to date. Here we aimed to identify molecular causation in 70 unrelated probands ascertained with CAS. We performed trio genome sequencing. Our bioinformatic analysis examined single nucleotide, indel, copy number, structural and short tandem repeat variants. We prioritised appropriate variants arising de novo or inherited that were expected to be damaging based on in silico predictions. We identified high confidence variants in 18/70 (26%) probands, almost doubling the current number of candidate genes for CAS. Three of the 18 variants affected SETBP1, SETD1A and DDX3X, thus confirming their roles in CAS, while the remaining 15 occurred in genes not previously associated with this disorder. Fifteen variants arose de novo and three were inherited. We provide further novel insights into the biology of child speech disorder, highlighting the roles of chromatin organization and gene regulation in CAS, and confirm that genes involved in CAS are co-expressed during brain development. Our findings confirm a diagnostic yield comparable to, or even higher, than other neurodevelopmental disorders with substantial de novo variant burden. Data also support the increasingly recogni...