Protein Binding Studies for Expanded Poly-A Repeats and Mutant PABP2 resulting from Oculopharyngeal Muscular Dystrophy Oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy (OPMD) is an inherited neuromuscular genetic disorder. It has an autosomal dominant pattern of inheritance (Fried et al. 1975) in that the abnormal gene can be transmitted from only one parent. A child of an affected parent has a 50% chance of being affected. The disorder is found to be more prevalent among French-Canadians and is characterized by its late onset (approximately 50). Affected persons experience dropping eyelids (optosis), difficulty with swallowing (dysphagia), and some develop shoulder, hip or leg weaknesses (MDA publications 1998). Genetically, its mutation is quite unique. OPMD is caused by the expansion of a GCG (which codes for the amino acid alanine) 6 repeat (Brais et al. 1998), whereas most triplet repeat disorders are expansions of CAG (glutamine) repeats. Rare polymorphisms would be to have 7 consecutive GCG's, but the disease is mostly characterized by the mutation of having 8-15 consecutive GCG's. Other findings have shown that even the expansion of a 6 GCG repeat to 7 can also lead to OPMD (LaFontaine 1996). The severity of the disease depends on the number of extra alanines. Quite recently, scientists have found that the mutation occurs on chromosome 14 and is in the gene coding for a poly(A)-binding protein 2 gene (PABP2) (Brais et al. 1998). PABP2 was considered a good candidate for OPMD because it maps to the same location as the diseased gene, its mRNA is highly expressed in skeletal muscle, and the PAB2 protein is exclusively localized in the nucleus, where it acts as a factor in mRNA polyadenylation. The site of the additional GCG expansions in the PABP2 gene is at the polyalanine tract at the N terminus. From these findings, one may ask why this disease targets preferentially the skeletal muscle cells of the eyes and throat when the pr...
