Resequencing the complete SNCA locus in Indian patients with Parkinson's disease

The genetic loci implicated in familial Parkinson's disease (PD) have limited generalizability to the Indian PD population. We tested mutations and the frequency of known mutations in the SNCA gene in a PD cohort from India. We selected 298 PD cases and 301 age-matched controls for targeted resequencing (before QC), along with 363 PD genomes of Indian ancestry and 1029 publicly available whole genomes from India as healthy controls (IndiGenomes), to determine the frequency of monogenic SNCA mutations. The raw sequence reads were analyzed using an in-house analysis pipeline, allowing the detection of small variants and structural variants using Manta. The in-depth analysis of the SNCA locus did not identify missense or structural variants, including previously identified SNCA mutations, in the Indian population. The familial forms of SNCA gene variants do not play a major role in the Indian PD population and this warrants further research in the under-represented population.