Tetralogy of Fallot (ToF) is one of the most common and severe congenital heart defects (CHD). Recently, unbalanced structural genomic variants or copy number variations (CNVs) were proposed to be involved in the etiology of many complex diseases, including CHDs. The aim of this study was to investigate the frequency of CNVs in a region with a high density of CNVs, 22q11.2, and other regions with CHD-related genes in a sample of 52 Mexican mestizo patients with isolated ToF and negative fluorescence in situ hybridization staining for 22q11. CNVs were studied using two multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification (MLPA) kits, SALSA P250-B1® (DiGeorge gene region) and SALSA MLPA P311-A1® CHD-related gene regions (GATA4, NKX2-5, TBX5, BMP4, and CRELD1). The MLPA assay detected a de novo CNV deletion of the probes located in exons 2 and 7 of the TBX1 gene in one of the 52 patients studied; this result was confirmed by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction. This deletion was not present in the patient's parents and 104 chromosomes from healthy control subjects. Our results clearly suggest a possible etiologic association between the TBX1 deletion and the ToF in our patient.
Keywords: DNA copy number variations; TBX1 gene; Tetralogy of Fallot.