Assessment of 6 STR loci for prenatal diagnosis of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

OBJECTIVE: Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy is an X-linked recessive disorder characterized by progressive muscular degeneration, patients often develop cardiac failure in the later stage and death occurs before 20 years of age. For a disease with poor postnatal prognosis such as Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), providing the carrier mother with the option of prenatal diagnosis in a subsequent pregnancy is accepted practice in many places where termination of pregnancy is allowed. Though methods of direct sequencing such as Sanger's sequencing has been widely used, Next-Generation Sequencing is been increasingly replacing most of its application. For the DMD gene, being the longest gene in the human genome, methods of direct sequencing is often unpractical and time-consuming, instead, STR analysis for linkage analysis would be a cost-effective option and have been used routinely for prenatal diagnosis of DMD. The diagnostic significance of the STRs is based on several criteria, the most important one being the heterozygosity of the locus, power of discrimination (PD) and power of exclusion (PE).

MATERIAL AND METHODS: In this study, we investigated the feasibility of application and diagnostic value of 6 STR loci (DSTR49, DSTR50, DXS1036, DXS1067, DXS890, DXS9907) in the proximity of the DMD gene, 66 healthy individuals were recruited for STR analysis and 5 cases of prenatal diagnosis for carrier mother were performed.

RESULT: Allele frequency, heterozygosity, polymorphic information content, the power of discrimination and exclusion and Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium were analyzed and calculated for the 6 STR loci. 5 of these loci (DSTR49, DSTR50, DXS1067, DXS890, DXS9907) were found practical and useful for preimplantation Genetic diagnosis (PGD) and prenatal diagnosis. All 5 cases of prenatal diagnosis using the method had informative STR results and correct diagnosis.

CONCLUSION: We concluded that our protocol of STR analysis can be applied for prenatal diagnosis and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis of DMD with high confidence and accuracy, especially in clinical settings where diagnostic resources are more limited.