Biallelic structural variants in three patients with ERCC8-related Cockayne syndrome and a potential pitfall of copy number variation analysis

Abstract

Cockayne syndrome (CS) is a rare autosomal recessive disorder caused by mutations in ERCC8 or ERCC6. Most pathogenic variants in ERCC8 are single nucleotide substitutions. Structural variants (SVs) have been reported in patients with ERCC8-related CS. However, comprehensive molecular detection, including SVs of ERCC8, in CS patients remains problematic. Herein, we present three Japanese patients with ERCC8-related CS in whom causative SVs were identified using whole-exome-based copy number variation (CNV) detection tools. One patient showed compound heterozygosity for a 259-kb deletion and a deletion of exon 4 which has previously been reported as an Asia-specific variant. The other two patients were homozygous for the same exon 4 deletion. The exon 4 deletion was detected only by the ExomeDepth software. Intrigued by the discrepancy in the detection capability of various tools for the SVs, we evaluated the analytic performance of four whole-exome-based CNV detection tools using an exome data set from 337 healthy individuals. A total of 1,278,141 exons were predicted as being affected by the 4 CNV tools. Interestingly 95.1% of these affected exons were detected by one tool alone. Thus, we expect that the use of multiple tools may improve the detection rate of SVs from aligned exome data.