Narrowing the critical region for congenital vertical talus in patients with interstitial 18q deletions.

Interstitial deletions of 18q lead to a number of phenotypic features, including multiple types of foot deformities. Many of these associated phenotypes have had their critical regions narrowly defined. Here we report on three patients with small overlapping deletions of chromosome 18q determined by microarray analysis (chr18:72493281-73512553 hg19 coordinates). All of the patients have congenital vertical talus (CVT). Based on these findings and previous reports in the literature and databases, we narrow the critical region for CVT to a minimum of five genes (ZNF407, ZADH2, TSHZ1, C18orf62, and ZNF516), and propose that TSHZ1 is the likely causative gene for CVT in 18q deletion syndrome.