Publications by authors named "Jonathan Sebat"

Copy-number variants (CNVs) that increase the risk for neurodevelopmental disorders also affect cognitive ability. However, such CNVs remain challenging to study due to their scarcity, limiting our understanding of gene-dosage-sensitive biological processes linked to cognitive ability. We performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in 258,292 individuals, which identified-for the first time-a duplication at 2q12.

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The role of genetic testing in the domain of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders (NPDs) is gradually changing from providing etiological explanation for the presence of NPD phenotypes to also identifying young individuals at high risk of developing NPDs before their clinical manifestation. In clinical practice, the latter implies a shift towards the availability of individual genetic information predicting a certain liability to develop an NPD (e.g.

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Rare recurrent copy number variants (CNVs) at chromosomal loci 22q11.2 and 16p11.2 are genetic disorders with lifespan risk for neuropsychiatric disorders.

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Observational studies suggest that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) increases risk for various autoimmune diseases. Insights into shared biology and causal relationships between these diseases may inform intervention approaches to PTSD and co-morbid autoimmune conditions. We investigated the shared genetic contributions and causal relationships between PTSD, 18 autoimmune diseases, and 3 immune/inflammatory biomarkers.

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The seventh iteration of the reference genome assembly for Rattus norvegicus-mRatBN7.2-corrects numerous misplaced segments and reduces base-level errors by approximately 9-fold and increases contiguity by 290-fold compared with its predecessor. Gene annotations are now more complete, improving the mapping precision of genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomics datasets.

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Rare recurrent copy number variants (CNVs) at chromosomal loci 22q11.2 and 16p11.2 are among the most common rare genetic disorders associated with significant risk for neuropsychiatric disorders across the lifespan.

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While germline copy-number variants (CNVs) contribute to schizophrenia (SCZ) risk, the contribution of somatic CNVs (sCNVs)-present in some but not all cells-remains unknown. We identified sCNVs using blood-derived genotype arrays from 12,834 SCZ cases and 11,648 controls, filtering sCNVs at loci recurrently mutated in clonal blood disorders. Likely early-developmental sCNVs were more common in cases (0.

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The seventh iteration of the reference genome assembly for -mRatBN7.2-corrects numerous misplaced segments and reduces base-level errors by approximately 9-fold and increases contiguity by 290-fold compared to its predecessor. Gene annotations are now more complete, significantly improving the mapping precision of genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomics data sets.

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Mosaic variants (MVs) reflect mutagenic processes during embryonic development and environmental exposure, accumulate with aging and underlie diseases such as cancer and autism. The detection of noncancer MVs has been computationally challenging due to the sparse representation of nonclonally expanded MVs. Here we present DeepMosaic, combining an image-based visualization module for single nucleotide MVs and a convolutional neural network-based classification module for control-independent MV detection.

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Article Synopsis
  • Full understanding of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) genetics requires whole-genome sequencing (WGS), highlighted by the latest Autism Speaks MSSNG resource that includes data from over 11,000 individuals.
  • The study found ASD-associated rare genetic variants in about 14% of individuals with ASD, examining data from MSSNG and the Simons Simplex Collection, which suggests similar prevalence in both datasets.
  • The identified variants were mostly nuclear (98%) with a small fraction being mitochondrial, and the research aims to help explore genetic links to ASD traits and identify causes for the 85% of ASD cases that currently lack identified genetic causes.
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Article Synopsis
  • - This study offers a new method to analyze genetic influences on autism by exploring a large area of the genome instead of just mapping individual gene associations.
  • - Researchers identified a significant region (the 33-Mb p-arm of chromosome 16) that has a higher concentration of genetic factors linked to autism, including the 16p11.2 copy number variant.
  • - The findings show both common and rare genetic variations on chromosome 16 are linked to lower gene expression levels, suggesting they may work together in affecting autism risk.
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Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a heritable (h = 24-71%) psychiatric illness. Copy number variation (CNV) is a form of rare genetic variation that has been implicated in the etiology of psychiatric disorders, but no large-scale investigation of CNV in PTSD has been performed. We present an association study of CNV burden and PTSD symptoms in a sample of 114,383 participants (13,036 cases and 101,347 controls) of European ancestry.

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Article Synopsis
  • Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex genetic condition with significant heritability, and rare genetic variants play an important role in its risk.
  • A study involving 309 Japanese ASD cases and 299 controls identified associations between rare genetic variants and specific neurodevelopmental gene sets, notably in synaptic function genes.
  • The findings highlight the importance of the ABCA13 gene, related to synaptic function, in the context of ASD susceptibility among the Japanese population.
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Mouse substrains are an invaluable model for understanding disease. We compared C57BL/6J, which is the most commonly used inbred mouse strain, with eight C57BL/6 and five C57BL/10 closely related inbred substrains. Whole-genome sequencing and RNA-sequencing analysis yielded 352,631 SNPs, 109,096 indels, 150,344 short tandem repeats (STRs), 3,425 structural variants (SVs), and 2,826 differentially expressed genes (DE genes) among these 14 strains; 312,981 SNPs (89%) distinguished the B6 and B10 lineages.

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Article Synopsis
  • The genetic origins of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are complex, involving both rare and common genetic factors, with a noticeable difference in risk based on sex, showing that females generally have a higher genetic load.
  • Both de novo mutations and inherited variants are linked to varying levels of symptom severity in children and their parents, and parental age plays a role due to genetic changes over time.
  • Rare genetic variants mainly affect genes related to neuron function, contributing to the diverse spectrum of ASD symptoms and suggesting that genetic influences impact different neurodevelopmental processes.
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Rare genomic disorders (RGDs) confer elevated risk for neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders. In this era of intense genomics discoveries, the landscape of RGDs is rapidly evolving. However, there has not been comparable progress to date in scalable, harmonized phenotyping methods.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigated the genetics of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its relationship with lifetime trauma exposure (LTE) using a genome-wide association study (GWAS) involving over 182,000 participants.
  • Researchers identified 5 significant genetic loci related to PTSD symptoms and 6 related to LTE, revealing a 72% genetic correlation between the two.
  • The findings suggest that a quantitative measurement approach can uncover new risk factors for PTSD and emphasizes the importance of considering trauma exposure to improve genetic discovery.
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Reciprocal deletion and duplication of the 16p11.2 region is the most common copy number variation (CNV) associated with autism spectrum disorders. We generated cortical organoids from skin fibroblasts of patients with 16p11.

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Throughout development and aging, human cells accumulate mutations resulting in genomic mosaicism and genetic diversity at the cellular level. Mosaic mutations present in the gonads can affect both the individual and the offspring and subsequent generations. Here, we explore patterns and temporal stability of clonal mosaic mutations in male gonads by sequencing ejaculated sperm.

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Motivation: As sequencing technologies and analysis pipelines evolve, de novo mutation (DNM) calling tools must be adapted. Therefore, a flexible approach is needed that can accurately identify DNMs from genome or exome sequences from a variety of datasets and variant calling pipelines.

Results: Here, we describe SynthDNM, a random-forest based classifier that can be readily adapted to new sequencing or variant-calling pipelines by applying a flexible approach to constructing simulated training examples from real data.

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E3-ubiquitin ligase Cullin3 (Cul3) is a high confidence risk gene for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and developmental delay (DD). To investigate how Cul3 mutations impact brain development, we generated a haploinsufficient Cul3 mouse model using CRISPR/Cas9 genome engineering. Cul3 mutant mice exhibited social and cognitive deficits and hyperactive behavior.

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Identifying pathogenic variants and underlying functional alterations is challenging. To this end, we introduce MutPred2, a tool that improves the prioritization of pathogenic amino acid substitutions over existing methods, generates molecular mechanisms potentially causative of disease, and returns interpretable pathogenicity score distributions on individual genomes. Whilst its prioritization performance is state-of-the-art, a distinguishing feature of MutPred2 is the probabilistic modeling of variant impact on specific aspects of protein structure and function that can serve to guide experimental studies of phenotype-altering variants.

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