Molecular genetic approaches to human diseases involving mental retardation

Recombinant DNA techniques provide new approaches to the diagnosis and analysis of inherited human diseases associated with mental retardation. Examples of such diseases include the Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, phenylketonuria, the Fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome, and those associated with deletions or duplications of subchromosomal regions, e.g., the proximal short arm of human chromosome #15. For a limited but increasing number of diseases, the DNA sequences responsible for the phenotype (e.g., sequences coding for abnormal proteins) can be isolated directly. In many other cases, DNA segments mapping near genes responsible for diseases of interest can be isolated, e.g., from recombinant phage libraries enriched for specific regions of the genome by metaphase chromosome flow-sorting and then used in molecular linkage studies to "track" the abnormal gene in a pedigree. Both the necessary technology and the methods for its application continue to improve, and the impact of recombinant DNA studies in the field of mental retardation should increase markedly in the very near future.