An overview of germline variations in genes of primary immunodeficiences through integrative analysis of ClinVar, HGMD® and dbSNP databases

Genetics and Traumatic Brain Injury: Findings from an Exome-Based Study of a 50-Patient Case Series

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the leading cause of global mortality and morbidity. Because TBI is accident-related, the role of genetics in predisposing to TBI has been largely unexplored. However, the likelihood of injury may not be entirely random and may be associated with certain physical and mental characteristics. In this study, we analyzed the exomes of 50 patients undergoing rehabilitation after TBI. Patients were divided into three groups according to rehabilitation outcome: improvement, no change, and deterioration/death. We focused on rare, potentially functional missense and high-impact variants in genes intolerant to these variants. The concordant results from the three independent groups of patients allowed for the suggestion of the existence of a genetic predisposition to TBI, associated with rare functional variations in intolerant genes, with a prevalent dominant mode of inheritance and neurological manifestations in the genetic phenotypes according to the OMIM database. Forty-four of the 50 patients had one or more rare, potentially deleterious variants in one or more neurological genes. Comparison of these results with those of a 50-sampled matched non-TBI cohort revealed significant differences: P = 2.6 × 10-3, OR = 4.89 (1.77-13.47). There were no differences in the distribution of the genes of interest between the TBI patient groups. Our exploratory study provides new insights into the impact of genetics on TBI risk and is the first to address potential genetic susceptibility to TBI.

mvPPT: A Highly Efficient and Sensitive Pathogenicity Prediction Tool for Missense Variants

Next-generation sequencing technologies both boost the discovery of variants in the human genome and exacerbate the challenges of pathogenic variant identification. In this study, we developed Pathogenicity Prediction Tool for missense variants (mvPPT), a highly sensitive and accurate missense variant classifier based on gradient boosting. mvPPT adopts high-confidence training sets with a wide spectrum of variant profiles, and extracts three categories of features, including scores from existing prediction tools, frequencies (allele frequencies, amino acid frequencies, and genotype frequencies), and genomic context. Compared with established predictors, mvPPT achieves superior performance in all test sets, regardless of data source. In addition, our study also provides guidance for training set and feature selection strategies, as well as reveals highly relevant features, which may further provide biological insights into variant pathogenicity. mvPPT is freely available at http://www.mvppt.club/.

Pneumonia and Related Conditions in Critically Ill Patients—Insights from Basic and Experimental Studies

Pneumonia is an acute infectious disease with high morbidity and mortality rates. Pneumonia’s development, severity and outcome depend on age, comorbidities and the host immune response. In this study, we combined theoretical and experimental investigations to characterize pneumonia and its comorbidities as well as to assess the host immune response measured by TREC/KREC levels in patients with pneumonia. The theoretical study was carried out using the Columbia Open Health Data (COHD) resource, which provides access to clinical concept prevalence and co-occurrence from electronic health records. The experimental study included TREC/KREC assays in young adults (18–40 years) with community-acquired (CAP) (n = 164) or nosocomial (NP) (n = 99) pneumonia and healthy controls (n = 170). Co-occurring rates between pneumonia, sepsis, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and some other related conditions common in intensive care units were the top among 4170, 3382 and 963 comorbidities in pneumonia, sepsis and ARDS, respectively. CAP patients had higher TREC levels, while NP patients had lower TREC/KREC levels compared to controls. Low TREC and KREC levels were predictive for the development of NP, ARDS, sepsis and lethal outcome (AUC_TREC in the range 0.71–0.82, AUC_KREC in the range 0.67–0.74). TREC/KREC analysis can be considered as a potential prognostic test in patients with pneumonia.