There now exist multiple lines of evidence pointing to a significant genetic component underlying the aetiology of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). The advent of methodologies for scanning the human genome at high resolution, coupled with the recognition of copy number variation (C ...
Psychiatric disorders are multifactorial in nature with complex genetic architecture. A number of recent studies, building upon earlier findings of copy number variants (CNVs) at the 22q11.2 locus, suggest that rare CNVs represent an important component of genetic heterogeneity in ...
The genetic causes of mental retardation are highly heterogeneous and for a large proportion unknown. Mutations as well as large chromosomal abnormalities are known to contribute to mental retardation, and recently more subtle structural genomic variations have been shown to contr ...
During the past decade, widespread use of microarray-based technologies, including oligonucleotide array comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping arrays have dramatically changed our perspective on genome-wide s ...
The elucidation of genomic disorders began with molecular technologies that enabled detection of genomic changes which were (a) smaller than those resolved by traditional cytogenetics (less than 5 Mb) and (b) larger than what could be determined by conventional gel electrophoresis. M ...
The emergence of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies offers an incredible opportunity to comprehensively study DNA sequence variation in human genomes. Commercially available platforms from Roche (454), Illumina (Genome Analyzer and Hiseq 2000), and Applied Bio ...
Since the completion of the human genome project, there has been enormous progress in the development of novel technologies for DNA sequencing. The advent of next-generation sequencing technologies now makes it possible to sequence an entire human genome in one or a few experiments. As a conse ...
We describe protocols to acquire high-quality DNA from formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues for the use in array comparative genome hybridization (CGH). Formalin fixation combined with paraffin embedding is routine procedure for solid malignancies in the diagno ...
The accessibility of genome-wide screening technologies considerably facilitated the identification and characterization of copy number variations (CNVs). The increasing amount of available data describing these variants, clearly demonstrates their abundance in the ...
SNP array data can be analysed for the purpose of calling SNP alleles but also for determining the absolute copy number of a certain genomic segment. Here, the method for detecting copy number (CN) change using intensity data from SNP arrays is focused on. Methods incorporating data from the two main ge ...
Genomic structural variation (SV) can be thought of on a continuum from a single base pair insertion/deletion (INDEL) to large megabase-scale rearrangements involving insertions, deletions, duplications, inversions, or translocations of whole chromosomes or chromosome arm ...
Somatic mosaicism is the result of postzygotic de novo mutation occurring in a portion of the cells making up an organism. Structural genetic variation is a very heterogeneous group of changes, in terms of numerous types of aberrations that are included in this category, involvement of many mec ...
Structural variation (SV) encompasses diverse types of genomic variants including deletions, duplications, inversions, transpositions, translocations, and complex rearrangements, and is now recognized to be an abundant class of genetic variation in mammals. Different in ...
Copy number variation has recently received considerable attention, and copy number variants (CNVs) have been shown to be both common in mammalian genomes and important for understanding genetic and phenotypic variation. As empirical knowledge and detection methods are quickly a ...
As advances in next generation sequencing continue to provide increasing access to the genomics �revolution for research systems having few or no genomic resources, transcriptome sequencing will only increase in importance as a fast and direct means of accessing the genes themselves. ...
There is a widespread need for methods to enrich DNA samples for sequences of interest prior to high-throughput sequencing and to reduce the costs associated with a shotgun approach. While useful for targeting megabase-sized regions in a few samples, hybridization capture approaches su ...
Transcriptome sequencing provides quick, direct access to the mRNA. With this information, one can design primers for PCR of thousands of different genes, SNP markers, probes for microarrays and qPCR, or just use the sequence data itself in comparative studies. Transcriptome sequencing, ...
DNA microarrays provide an efficient means of identifying single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in DNA samples and characterizing their frequencies in individual and mixed samples. We have studied the parameters that determine the sensitivity of DNA probes to SNPs and found that ...
Often in evolutionary genetics research, one needs to analyze polymorphisms in populations for which cost-efficient high-throughput arrays are nonexistent, either because the species is not a model organism or because the populations have been subjected to such specific conditi ...
Microsatellite DNA loci are tandemly repeated simple sequence repeats (SSRs) that are ubiquitous in eukaryotic genomes. When flanked by unique sequences, length variation (driven by high rates of strand slippage during DNA replication) at a given repeat locus can be assayed by PCR and elec ...