Project description:As part of the Dystrophia Myotonica Biomarker Discovery Initiative (DMBDI) a dataset was obtained from 35 participants, including 31 Myotonic Dystrophy type 1 (DM1) cases and four unaffected controls. All DM1 cases in this research were heterozygous for the abnormally expanded CTG repeat. The mode of the length of the DM1 CTG expansion (Modal Allele Length, MAL) was determined by small-pool PCR of blood DNA for 35/36 patients. For this work we did not attempt to measure the repeat length from muscle, due to a very high degree of repeat instability in muscle cells, and associated difficulties in its experimental measurement. One patient refused blood donation. For each of the 35 blood-donating patients mRNA expression profiling of blood was performed using Affymetrix GeneChip™ Human Exon 1.0 ST microarray. For 28 of 36 patients a successful quadriceps muscle biopsy was obtained. The muscle tissue was mRNA profiled using the same type of microarray. In total, a complete set of samples (blood and muscle) was obtained for 27 of 36 patients; samples were given a disease staging score based on muscle impairment rating. mRNA profiling was carried out by the GeneLogic service lab (on a fee-for-service basis) using standard Affymetrix hybridisation protocol.
Project description:The development of precision medicine strategies requires prior knowledge of the genetic background of the target population. However, despite the availability of data from admixed Americans within large reference population databases, we cannot use these data as a surrogate for that of the Brazilian population. This lack of transferability is mainly due to differences between ancestry proportions of Brazilian and other admixed American populations. To address the issue, a coalition of research centres created the Brazilian Initiative on Precision Medicine (BIPMed), an initiative of five Research Innovation and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs) supported by FAPESP.
