Recessive LAMA5 Variants Associated With Partial Epilepsy and Spasms in Infancy

Genetic variants that inactivate protein-coding genes are a powerful source of information about the phenotypic consequences of gene disruption: genes that are crucial for the function of an organism will be depleted of such variants in natural populations, whereas non-essential genes will tolerate their accumulation. However, predicted loss-of-function variants are enriched for annotation errors, and tend to be found at extremely low frequencies, so their analysis requires careful variant annotation and very large sample sizes 1 . Here we describe the aggregation of 125,748 exomes and 15,708 genomes from human sequencing studies into the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD). We identify 443,769 high-confidence predicted loss-of-function variants in this cohort after filtering for artefacts caused by sequencing and annotation errors. Using an improved model of human mutation rates, we classify human protein-coding genes along a spectrum that represents tolerance to inactivation, validate this classification using data from model organisms and engineered human cells, and show that it can be used to improve the power of gene discovery for both common and rare diseases.

Genome-wide association studies have identified thousands of loci for common diseases, but, for the majority of these, the mechanisms underlying disease susceptibility remain unknown. Most associated variants are not correlated with protein-coding changes, suggesting that polymorphisms in regulatory regions probably contribute to many disease phenotypes. Here we describe the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project, which will establish a resource database and associated tissue bank for the scientific community to study the relationship between genetic variation and gene expression in human tissues.

The I-TASSER server (http://zhanglab.ccmb.med.umich.edu/I-TASSER) is an online resource for automated protein structure prediction and structure-based function annotation. In I-TASSER, structural templates are first recognized from the PDB using multiple threading alignment approaches. Full-length structure models are then constructed by iterative fragment assembly simulations. The functional insights are finally derived by matching the predicted structure models with known proteins in the function databases. Although the server has been widely used for various biological and biomedical investigations, numerous comments and suggestions have been reported from the user community. In this article, we summarize recent developments on the I-TASSER server, which were designed to address the requirements from the user community and to increase the accuracy of modeling predictions. Focuses have been made on the introduction of new methods for atomic-level structure refinement, local structure quality estimation and biological function annotations. We expect that these new developments will improve the quality of the I-TASSER server and further facilitate its use by the community for high-resolution structure and function prediction.