Results from Drosophila help point to changes in TANGO2 as causative for an infancy-onset metabolic disorder

Kremer LS, Distelmaier F, Alhaddad B, Hempel M, Iuso A, Küpper C, Mühlhausen C, Kovacs-Nagy R, Satanovskij R, Graf E, Berutti R, Eckstein G, Durbin R, Sauer S, Hoffmann GF, Strom TM, Santer R, Meitinger T, Klopstock T, Prokisch H, Haack TB. Bi-allelic Truncating Mutations in TANGO2 Cause Infancy-Onset Recurrent Metabolic Crises with Encephalocardiomyopathy. Am J Hum Genet. 2016 Feb 4;98(2):358-62. PMID: 26805782; PMCID: PMC4746337.

From the abstract: "Molecular diagnosis of mitochondrial disorders is challenging because of extreme clinical and genetic heterogeneity. By exome sequencing, we identified three different bi-allelic truncating mutations in TANGO2 in three unrelated individuals with infancy-onset episodic metabolic crises ... TANGO2 (transport and Golgi organization 2) encodes a protein with a putative function in redistribution of Golgi membranes into the endoplasmic reticulum in Drosophila and a mitochondrial localization has been confirmed in mice. ... Our results establish TANGO2 deficiency as a clinically recognizable cause of pediatric disease with multi-organ involvement."