µLAS: Sizing of expanded trinucleotide repeats with femtomolar sensitivity in less than 5 minutes

Malbec, Rémi, Chami, Bayan, Aeschbach, Lorène, Ruiz Buendía, Gustavo A., Socol, Marius, Joseph, Pierre, Leïchlé, Thierry, Trofimenko, Evgeniya, Bancaud, Aurélien and Dion, Vincent ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4953-7637 2019. µLAS: Sizing of expanded trinucleotide repeats with femtomolar sensitivity in less than 5 minutes. Scientific Reports 9 (1) , 23. 10.1038/s41598-018-36632-5

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (2MB) | Preview

Abstract

We present µLAS, a lab-on-chip system that concentrates, separates, and detects DNA fragments in a single module. µLAS speeds up DNA size analysis in minutes using femtomolar amounts of amplified DNA. Here we tested the relevance of µLAS for sizing expanded trinucleotide repeats, which cause over 20 different neurological and neuromuscular disorders. Because the length of trinucleotide repeats correlates with the severity of the diseases, it is crucial to be able to size repeat tract length accurately and efficiently. Expanded trinucleotide repeats are however genetically unstable and difficult to amplify. Thus, the amount of amplified material to work with is often limited, making its analysis labor-intensive. We report the detection of heterogeneous allele lengths in 8 samples from myotonic dystrophy type 1 and Huntington disease patients with up to 750 CAG/CTG repeats in five minutes or less. The high sensitivity of the method allowed us to minimize the number of amplification cycles and thus reduce amplification artefacts without compromising the detection of the expanded allele. These results suggest that µLAS can speed up routine molecular biology applications of repetitive sequences and may improve the molecular diagnostic of expanded repeat disorders.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Medicine
Publisher:	Nature Publishing Group
ISSN:	2045-2322
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 January 2019
Date of Acceptance:	21 November 2018
Last Modified:	06 May 2023 01:34
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/118388

Citation Data

Cited 10 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item