Rates of contributory de novo mutation in high and low-risk autism families.

Autism arises in high and low-risk families. De novo mutation contributes to autism incidence in low-risk families as there is a higher incidence in the affected of the simplex families than in their unaffected siblings. But the extent of contribution in low-risk families cannot be determined solely from simplex families as they are a mixture of low and high-risk. The rate of de novo mutation in nearly pure populations of high-risk families, the multiplex families, has not previously been rigorously determined. Moreover, rates of de novo mutation have been underestimated from studies based on low resolution microarrays and whole exome sequencing. Here we report on findings from whole genome sequence (WGS) of both simplex families from the Simons Simplex Collection (SSC) and multiplex families from the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE). After removing the multiplex samples with excessive cell-line genetic drift, we find that the contribution of de novo mutation in multiplex is significantly smaller than the contribution in simplex. We use WGS to provide high resolution CNV profiles and to analyze more than coding regions, and revise upward the rate in simplex autism due to an excess of de novo events targeting introns. Based on this study, we now estimate that de novo events contribute to 52-67% of cases of autism arising from low risk families, and 30-39% of cases of all autism

De novo indels within introns contribute to ASD incidence

Copy number profiling and whole-exome sequencing has allowed us to make remarkable progress in our understanding of the genetics of autism over the past ten years, but there are major aspects of the genetics that are unresolved. Through whole-genome sequencing, additional types of genetic variants can be observed. These variants are abundant and to know which are functional is challenging. We have analyzed whole-genome sequencing data from 510 of the Simons Simplex Collections quad families and focused our attention on intronic variants. Within the introns of 546 high-quality autism target genes, we identified 63 de novo indels in the affected and only 37 in the unaffected siblings. The difference of 26 events is significantly larger than expected (p-val = 0.01) and using reasonable extrapolation shows that de novo intronic indels can contribute to at least 10% of simplex autism. The significance increases if we restrict to the half of the autism targets that are intolerant to damaging variants in the normal human population, which half we expect to be even more enriched for autism genes. For these 273 targets we observe 43 and 20 events in affected and unaffected siblings, respectively (p-value of 0.005). There was no significant signal in the number of de novo intronic indels in any of the control sets of genes analyzed. We see no signal from de novo substitutions in the introns of target genes