Dear Editor, We investigated whether screening by whole genome sequencing (WGS) in unselected newborns provides more information of potentially curable or treatable medical conditions than routine newborn screening (NBS). We demonstrated that compared with routine NBS, WGS produced fewer false positive results and identified more actionable pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants in the selective 246 genes.Previously, WGS has been used to identify mutated genes in newborn children with a suspected disease. 1 However, sequencing of apparently healthy newborns has remained controversial due to technical concerns and ethical issues. 2 In this study, 321 non-pre-selected newborns from a cohort of pregnant women in Qingdao, China were recruited (Table 1). DNA from 303 umbilical cord blood samples and 18 umbilical cords was extracted for 40X WGS. For data interpretation, we selected 251 genes associated with 59 Mendelian disorders, 164 primary immunodeficiency diseases (PIDs) and five pharmacogenetic (PGx) genes, following the guidelines by the Recommended Uniform Screening Panel (RUSP), the International Union of Immunologic Societies (IUIS) Expert Committee for Primary Immunodeficiency, the Dutch Pharmacogenetics Working Group (DPWG), and the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC). [3][4][5] Sequencing protocol, data analysis pipeline, and criteria for sequence variants interpretation following the ACMG/AMP guidelines are described in the Supporting Information. The WGS results were compared with NBS results, including the mandatory checks of hearing impairment and four metabolic diseases, the metabolic testing of 48 inherited metabolic diseases (IMDs), and the genetic screening for 20 hearing loss loci incorporated into the local NBS program in China. 6,7 Among the analysed DNA samples of 321 newborns, the average sequencing depth was 47.42X (28. 84X-82.90X) This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Both DNA damage response and methylation play a crucial role in antigen receptor recombination by creating a diverse repertoire in developing lymphocytes, but how their defects relate to T cell repertoire and phenotypic heterogeneity of immunodeficiency remains obscure. We studied the TCR repertoire in patients with the mutation in different genes (ATM, DNMT3B, ZBTB24, RAG1, DCLRE1C, and JAK3) and uncovered distinct characteristics of repertoire diversity. We propose that early aberrancies in thymus T cell development predispose to the heterogeneous phenotypes of the immunodeficiency spectrum. Shorter CDR3 lengths in ATM-deficient patients, resulting from a decreased number of nucleotide insertions during VDJ recombination in the pre-selected TCR repertoire, as well as the increment of CDR3 tyrosine residues, lead to the enrichment of pathology-associated TCRs, which may contribute to the phenotypes of ATM deficiency. Furthermore, patients with DNMT3B and ZBTB24 mutations who exhibit discrepant phenotypes present longer CDR3 lengths and reduced number of known pathology-associated TCRs.

NAD(P)HX dehydratase (NAXD) catalyzes the recovery of toxic derivatives of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotides which play an essential role in mitochondrial metabolism. Mutations in NAXD were recently shown to cause early-onset neurodegeneration exacerbated by febrile illness. Here, we report a novel homozygous stop-gain variant in NAXD in an infant who presented with a fulminant course of autoinflammation, dermatitis, colitis, and cystic encephalomalacia beginning at 3 weeks of age. Our findings support the central role of NAXD-mediated metabolite repair for normal tissue function and implicate innate immune processes in the pathogenesis of NAXD deficiency.

A novel allele HLA‐C*08:80 differs from HLA‐C*08:01:01:01 by one nucleotide substitution at position 142.