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Published on: August 15, 2019
Identification of a HOXD13 mutation in a VACTERL patient
Maria-Mercè Garcia-Barceló1, Kenneth Kak-yuen Wong, Vincent Chi-hang Lui
1Department of Surgery, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Abstract:
VACTERL acronym is assigned to a non-random association of malformations in humans with poorly known etiology. It is comprised of vertebral defects (V), anal atresia (A), cardiac anomaly (C), tracheoesophageal fistula with esophageal atresia (TE), renal dysplasia (R) and limb lesions (L). Here, we report on, for the first time, a female patient with VACTERL association with a 21 base-pair deletion in the exon 1 triplet repeats of HOXD13, a sonic hedgehog (SHH) downstream target. Our data provide the first piece of clinical evidence of the implication of the SHH pathway in VACTERL. Moreover, HOXD13 may not only be implicated in limb malformations but also in the development of gut and genitourinary structures, as predicted from the mouse models.
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