Papers of the week – DEPDC5, a “female protective model” and rescued KCNT1 mutations

In final week before our EuroEPINOMICS bioinformatics workshop in Leuven people get a little busy and start reading up on all sorts of things. Accordingly, this week’s papers come from all areas of genetics and life science, including three studies in Annals of Neurology on epilepsy genetics.

Navigating the epilepsiome – live from Tübingen

2D. I am writing this post during our EuroEPINOMICS meeting in Tübingen listening to presentation from CoGIE, the EuroEPINOMICS project working on IGE/GGE and Rolandic Epilepsies and RES, the project on rare epilepsies. At some point during the afternoon, I made my selection for the best graph during the presentations today – an overview of the conservation space of epilepsy genes.

Less is more – gene identification in epileptic encephalopathies through targeted resequencing

Exome no more. Over the last 15 months, we have repeatedly discussed how exome sequencing or genome sequencing is applied to neurodevelopmental disorders in order to discover new candidate genes and to assess the role of known candidate genes. We have also wondered sometimes whether exome sequencing is the most straightforward approach. Now – outpacing the two large international consortia using exome sequencing in epileptic encephalopathies – a recent study in Nature Genetics uses a different approach to uncover the genetic basis in 10% of patients with epileptic encephalopathies.  Targeted resequencing or gene panel analysis is a hybrid technology between candidate gene sequencing and next generation sequencing and focuses only on a subset of candidate genes. While their study provides a comprehensive overview over the genetics of rare epilepsy syndromes, it raises the question whether the era of large-scale exome sequencing is coming to a natural end.

Rolandic Epilepsy Explained?

Soundbites. I am very happy to have been part of the 1^st Waterloo Foundation Meeting on the Idiopathic Focal Epilepsies of Childhood, which took place at King’s College in London on September 29^th, 2012. This meeting was exclusively dedicated to everything rolandic. While the 10^th European Epilepsy Congress is just getting started, we thought that we could provide you with a few soundbites from this meeting. And — by the way — rolandic epilepsy is far from being explained.