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The amino-acid mutational spectrum of human genetic disease

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Abstract

Background

Nonsynonymous mutations in the coding regions of human genes are responsible for phenotypic differences between humans and for susceptibility to genetic disease. Computational methods were recently used to predict deleterious effects of nonsynonymous human mutations and polymorphisms. Here we focus on understanding the amino-acid mutation spectrum of human genetic disease. We compare the disease spectrum to the spectra of mutual amino-acid mutation frequencies, non-disease polymorphisms in human genes, and substitutions fixed between species.

Results

We find that the disease spectrum correlates well with the amino-acid mutation frequencies based on the genetic code. Normalized by the mutation frequencies, the spectrum can be rationalized in terms of chemical similarities between amino acids. The disease spectrum is almost identical for membrane and non-membrane proteins. Mutations at arginine and glycine residues are together responsible for about 30% of genetic diseases, whereas random mutations at tryptophan and cysteine have the highest probability of causing disease.

Conclusions

The overall disease spectrum mainly reflects the mutability of the genetic code. We corroborate earlier results that the probability of a nonsynonymous mutation causing a genetic disease increases monotonically with an increase in the degree of evolutionary conservation of the mutation site and a decrease in the solvent-accessibility of the site; opposite trends are observed for non-disease polymorphisms. We estimate that the rate of nonsynonymous mutations with a negative impact on human health is less than one per diploid genome per generation.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Jay Shendure, John Aach, Patrik D'haeseleer, Daniel Segre, Peter Kharchenko, and Tzachi Pilpel for discussions. This work was supported in part by research grants from the US Department of Energy through the grant DOE DE-FG02-87-ER60565.

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Author notes

  1. Chris Sander

    Present address: Computational Biology Center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, 1275 York Avenue, New York, NY, 10021, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lipper Center for Computational Genetics and Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Dennis Vitkup & George M Church

  2. Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Nine Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142, USA

    Chris Sander

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  1. Dennis Vitkup
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Correspondence to George M Church.

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Vitkup, D., Sander, C. & Church, G.M. The amino-acid mutational spectrum of human genetic disease. Genome Biol 4, R72 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1186/gb-2003-4-11-r72

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