Project description:Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most frequent birth defect and affects nearly 1% of newborns. The etiology of CHD is largely unknown and only a small percentage can be assigned to environmental risk factors such as maternal diseases or exposure to mutagenic agents during pregnancy. Chromosomal imbalances have been identified in many forms of syndromic CHD, but next to nothing is known about the impact of DNA copy number changes in non-syndromic CHD. Here we present a sub-megabase resolution array CGH screen of a cohort with CHD as the sole abnormality at the time of diagnosis. Keywords: array CGH In this BAC array CGH study 104 patients with congenital heart disease and some of their parents were screened for DNA copy number changes at submegabase resolution. No dye swap was performed.
Project description:Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most frequent birth defect and affects nearly 1% of newborns. The etiology of CHD is largely unknown and only a small percentage can be assigned to environmental risk factors such as maternal diseases or exposure to mutagenic agents during pregnancy. Chromosomal imbalances have been identified in many forms of syndromic CHD, but next to nothing is known about the impact of DNA copy number changes in non-syndromic CHD. Here we present a sub-megabase resolution array CGH screen of a cohort with CHD as the sole abnormality at the time of diagnosis. Keywords: array CGH
Project description:Congenital Hypothyroidism occurs in 1:3500 live births and is therefore the most common congenital endocrine disorder. A spectrum of defective thyroid morphology, termed thyroid dysgenesis, represents 80% of permanent CH cases. Although several candidate genes have been implicated in thyroid development, comprehensive screens failed to detect mutation carriers in a significant number of patients with non-syndromic TD. Due to the sporadic occurrence of TD, de novo chromosomal rearrangements are conceivably representing one of the molecular mechanisms participating in its aetiology. Recently, the use of array CGH technique has provided the ability to map these variations genomewide with high resolution. We performed an array CGH screen of 74 TD patients to determine the role of copy number variants (CNV) in the aetiology of the disease. We identified novel CNVs in 8.75% of all patients that have not been described as frequent variations in the healthy population. Affected patients presented with athyreosis or thyroid hypoplasia and in one case with associated heart malformation.