A Hunter Patient with a Severe Phenotype Reveals Two Large Deletions and Two Duplications Extending 1.2 Mb Distally...

Mucopolysaccharidosis type II (Hunter syndrome, MPS II) is an X-linked lysosomal storage disorder caused by the deficit of iduronate 2-sulfatase (IDS), an enzyme involved in the glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) degradation. We here report the case of a 9-year-old boy who was diagnosed with an extremely severe form of MPS II at 10 months of age. Sequencing of the IDS gene revealed the deletion of exons 1-7, extending distally and removing the entire pseudogene IDSP1. The difficulty to define the boundaries of the deletion and the particular severity of the patient phenotype suggested to verify the presence of pathological copy number variations (CNVs) in the genome, by the array CGH (aCGH) technology. The examination revealed the presence of two deletions alternate with two duplications, overall affecting a region of about 1.2 Mb distally to IDS gene. This is the first complex rearrangement involving IDS and extending to a large region located distally to it described in a severe Hunter patient, as evidenced by the CNVs databases interrogated. The analysis of the genes involved in the rearrangement and of the disorders correlated with them did not help to clarify the phenotype observed in our patient, except for the deletion of the IDS gene, which explains per se the Hunter phenotype. However, this cannot exclude a potential "contiguous gene syndrome" as well as the future rising of additional pathological symptoms associated with the other extra genes involved in the identified rearrangement.