Hereditary fructose intolerance caused by a nonsense mutation of the aldolase B gene

The nucleotide sequence of a patient's aldolase B gene was determined and showed a substitution of a single nucleotide (C----A) at position 720 in the coding region, which resulted in the 240th amino acid, a cysteine, being changed to a stop codon (TGC----TGA). By an allele-specific oligonucleotide probe and polymerase chain reaction, the patient was shown to be homozygous for the mutation. To examine whether this mutation causes functional defect of the enzyme, the activity of the aldolase B from the patient, expressed in Escherichia coli by using expression plasmid, was measured. No activity was observed, and the predicted product was recovered from E. coli expression plasmid, indicating that this nonsense mutation was the cause of aldolase B deficiency.