Mosaicism for maternal uniparental disomy 15 in a boy with some clinical features of Prader-Willi syndrome

Abstract

Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) is caused by the lack of paternal expression of imprinted genes in the human chromosomal region 15q11.2-q13.2, which can be due to an interstitial deletion at 15q11.2-q13 of paternal origin (65-75%), maternal uniparental disomy (matUPD) of chromosome 15 (20-30%), or an imprinting defect (1-3%). The majority of PWS-associated matUPD15 cases represent a complete heterodisomy of chromosome 15 or a mixture of hetero- and isodisomic regions across the chromosome 15. Pure maternal isodisomy is observed in only a few matUPD15 patients. Here we report a case of an 18-year-old boy with some clinical features of Prader-Willi syndrome, such as overweight, muscular hypotonia, facial dysmorphism and psychiatric problems, but there was no reason to suspect PWS in the patient based solely on the phenotype estimation. However, chromosomal microarray analysis (CMA) revealed mosaic loss of heterozygosity of the entire chromosome 15. Methylation-specific multiplex ligation-dependant probe amplification (MS-MLPA) analysis showed hypermethylation of the SNRPN and NDN genes in the PWS/AS critical region of chromosome 15 in this patient. Taking into consideration the MS-MLPA results and the presence of PWS features in the patient, we concluded that it was matUPD15, although the patient's parents were not enrolled in the study. According to CMA and karyotyping, no trisomic or monosomic cells were present. To the best of our knowledge, only two PWS cases with mosaic maternal isodisomy 15 and without trisomic/monosomic cell lines have been reported so far.

Keywords: Isodisomy; Mosaic; Prader–Willi syndrome; Uniparental disomy.