Abstract
BACKGROUND: The expanded CAG repeat in the Huntington's disease (HD) gene may display tissue-specific variability (e.g. triplet mosaicism) in repeat length, the longest mutations involving mitotic (germ and glial cells) and postmitotic (neurons) cells. What contributes to the triplet mutability underlying the development of HD nevertheless remains unknown. We investigated whether, besides the increased DNA instability documented in postmitotic neurons, possible environmental and genetic mechanisms, related to cell replication, may concur to determine CAG repeat mutability. To test this hypothesis we used, as a model, cultured HD patients' lymphoblasts with various CAG repeat lengths.
RESULTS: Although most lymphoblastoid cell lines (88%) showed little or no repeat instability even after six or more months culture, in lymphoblasts with large expansion repeats beyond 60 CAG repeats the mutation size and triplet mosaicism always increased during replication, implying that the repeat mutability for highly expanded mutations may quantitatively depend on the triplet expansion size. None of the investigated genetic factors, potentially acting in cis to the mutation, significantly influence the repeat changes. Finally, in our experiments certain drugs controlled triplet expansion in two prone-to-expand HD cell lines carrying large CAG mutations.
CONCLUSION: Our data support quantitative evidence that the inherited CAG length of expanded alleles has a major influence on somatic repeat variation. The longest triplet expansions show wide somatic variations and may offer a mechanistic model to study triplet drug-controlled instability and genetic factors influencing it.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-11-2009
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2350-10-11
Repository Citation
Cannella, Milena; Maglione, Vittorio; Martino, Tiziana; Ragona, Giuseppe; Frati, Luigi; Li, Guo-Min; and Squitieri, Ferdinando, "DNA instability in replicating Huntington's disease lymphoblasts" (2009). Toxicology and Cancer Biology Faculty Publications. 14.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/toxicology_facpub/14
Additional file 1
1471-2350-10-11-s2.eps (4462 kB)
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1471-2350-10-11-s3.eps (3587 kB)
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Notes/Citation Information
Published in BMC Medical Genetics, v. 10, 11.
© 2009 Cannella et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.