Drosophila studies contributed to -- another -- study that identifies a human disease gene

Ansar M, Chung HL, Taylor RL, Nazir A, Imtiaz S, Sarwar MT, Manousopoulou A, Makrythanasis P, Saeed S, Falconnet E, Guipponi M, Pournaras CJ, Ansari MA, Ranza E, Santoni FA, Ahmed J, Shah I, Gul K, Black GC, Bellen HJ, Antonarakis SE. Bi-allelic Loss-of-Function Variants in DNMBP Cause Infantile Cataracts. Am J Hum Genet. 2018 Oct 4;103(4):568-578. PMID: 30290152; PMCID: PMC6174361.

From the abstract: "Infantile and childhood-onset cataracts form a heterogeneous group of disorders; among the many genetic causes, numerous pathogenic variants in additional genes associated with autosomal-recessive infantile cataracts remain to be discovered. We identified three consanguineous families affected by bilateral infantile cataracts. Using exome sequencing, we found homozygous loss-of-function variants in DNMBP ... The phenotypes of all affected individuals include infantile-onset cataracts. RNAi-mediated knockdown of the Drosophila ortholog still life (sif), enriched in lens-secreting cells, affects the development of these cells as well as the localization of E-cadherin, alters the distribution of septate junctions in adjacent cone cells, and leads to a ∼50% reduction in electroretinography amplitudes in young flies. ... We therefore conclude that DNMBP loss-of-function variants cause infantile-onset cataracts in humans."

Big thank you to the US NIH Office of Research Infrastructure Programs (ORIP) for support of projects that generated fly stocks and other resources used in this study.