TY - JOUR
T1 - Maternal age effect and severe germ-line bottleneck in the inheritance of human mitochondrial DNA
AU - Rebolledo-Jaramillo, Boris
AU - Su, Marcia Shu-Wei
AU - Stoler, Nicholas
AU - McElhoe, Jennifer A.
AU - Dickins, Benjamin
AU - Blankenberg, Daniel
AU - Korneliussen, Thorfinn Sand
AU - Chiaromonte, Francesca
AU - Nielsen, Rasmus
AU - Holland, Mitchell M.
AU - Paul, Ian M.
AU - Nekrutenko, Anton
AU - Makova, Kateryna D.
PY - 2014/10/28
Y1 - 2014/10/28
N2 - The manifestation of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) diseases depends on the frequency of heteroplasmy (the presence of several alleles in an individual), yet its transmission across generations cannot be readily predicted owing to a lack of data on the size of the mtDNA bottleneck during oogenesis. For deleterious heteroplasmies, a severe bottleneck may abruptly transform a benign (low) frequency in a mother into a disease-causing (high) frequency in her child. Here we present a high-resolution study of heteroplasmy transmission conducted on blood and buccal mtDNA of 39 healthy mother-child pairs of European ancestry (a total of 156 samples, each sequenced at ∼20,000x per site). On average, each individual carried one heteroplasmy, and one in eight individuals carried a disease-associated heteroplasmy, with minor allele frequency ≥1%. We observed frequent drastic heteroplasmy frequency shifts between generations and estimated the effective size of the germline mtDNA bottleneck at only ∼30-35 (interquartile range from 9 to 141). Accounting for heteroplasmies, we estimated the mtDNA germ-line mutation rate at 1.3 × 10-8 (interquartile range from 4.2 × 10-9 to 4.1 × 10-8) mutations per site per year, an order of magnitude higher than for nuclear DNA. Notably,we found a positive association between the number of heteroplasmies in a child andmaternal age at fertilization, likely attributable to oocyte aging. This study also took advantage of droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) to validate heteroplasmies and confirm a de novomutation. Our results can be used to predict the transmission of disease-causing mtDNA variants and illuminate evolutionary dynamics of the mitochondrial genome.
AB - The manifestation of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) diseases depends on the frequency of heteroplasmy (the presence of several alleles in an individual), yet its transmission across generations cannot be readily predicted owing to a lack of data on the size of the mtDNA bottleneck during oogenesis. For deleterious heteroplasmies, a severe bottleneck may abruptly transform a benign (low) frequency in a mother into a disease-causing (high) frequency in her child. Here we present a high-resolution study of heteroplasmy transmission conducted on blood and buccal mtDNA of 39 healthy mother-child pairs of European ancestry (a total of 156 samples, each sequenced at ∼20,000x per site). On average, each individual carried one heteroplasmy, and one in eight individuals carried a disease-associated heteroplasmy, with minor allele frequency ≥1%. We observed frequent drastic heteroplasmy frequency shifts between generations and estimated the effective size of the germline mtDNA bottleneck at only ∼30-35 (interquartile range from 9 to 141). Accounting for heteroplasmies, we estimated the mtDNA germ-line mutation rate at 1.3 × 10-8 (interquartile range from 4.2 × 10-9 to 4.1 × 10-8) mutations per site per year, an order of magnitude higher than for nuclear DNA. Notably,we found a positive association between the number of heteroplasmies in a child andmaternal age at fertilization, likely attributable to oocyte aging. This study also took advantage of droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) to validate heteroplasmies and confirm a de novomutation. Our results can be used to predict the transmission of disease-causing mtDNA variants and illuminate evolutionary dynamics of the mitochondrial genome.
U2 - 10.1073/pnas.1409328111
DO - 10.1073/pnas.1409328111
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 25313049
SN - 0027-8424
VL - 111
SP - 15474
EP - 15479
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
IS - 43
ER -