08 Aug 2010

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is tragic when it hits in late or middle age, but a rare juvenile form of the disease is all the more devastating because it attacks people in their late teens and early twenties. “Juvenile ALS is a relatively overlooked entity,” wrote Eric Huang, of the University of California in San Francisco, in an e-mail to ARF. Researchers do not know why the disease manifests so early, or even if it has the same cause as later-onset ALS (Gouveia and de Carvalho, 2007). A pair of recent papers suggests juvenile ALS shares some features, namely mutations in the gene fused in sarcoma (FUS), with late-onset ALS. FUS mutations appear at a high frequency in juvenile ALS cases.

In the July 28 Neurology online, researchers led by Olaf Ansorge at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, UK, report findings from four cases of juvenile ALS with basophilic inclusions. These filamentous, protein aggregates are common in juvenile ALS, whereas inclusions in late-onset ALS tend not to be basophilic (Matsumoto et al., 1993). The young patients showed their first motor symptoms between 17 and 22 years of age. After autopsy, the study authors discovered all had basophilic, intraneuronal protein deposits in motor neurons and the motor cortex. These inclusions contained FUS, but not TDP-43, another aggregation-prone protein commonly linked to ALS. Although these people had no family history of motor neuron disease, gene sequencing of three of the four cases identified FUS mutations. One patient had a four-base pair deletion, predicted to cause a frameshift in the last eight amino acids of the protein. Two others carried a P525L mutation, which has been found in familial (see ARF related news story on Kwiatkowski et al., 2009) as well as sporadic (Chiò et al., 2010) ALS.

In an editorial accompanying the Neurology paper, David Munoz of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada, cited the lack of a family history of motor neuron disease as one of the most interesting results in the paper. It suggests, Munoz wrote, that people with juvenile ALS may carry newly arisen FUS mutations. “The practicing neurologist cannot safely assume that the absence of family history negates the need for genetic screening,” he wrote.

Two more cases of juvenile ALS with basophilic inclusions were described in the May 25 Brain Pathology online. First author Huang, senior author Catherine Lomen-Hoerth, also at UCSF, and colleagues reported that one of the young women carried the FUS P525L mutation, although neither of her parents did. The other woman had wild-type FUS. At autopsy, both evinced abnormal FUS-containing aggregates in motor neurons and the cortex.

The prevalence of FUS pathology in juvenile ALS contrasts with sporadic late-onset ALS, Huang and colleagues wrote, where TDP-43 pathology is generally prevalent. In fact, FUS aggregates are usually associated with frontotemporal dementia with basophilic inclusions (Urwin et al., 2010). Therefore, the research suggests both a similarity between juvenile and late-onset ALS, in that both are linked to FUS mutations, as well as a difference in that the pathological inclusions are distinct.

The cause of juvenile ALS remains unclear, Huang told ARF, but the FUS P525L mutation is particularly common in young-onset cases. In another recent study, he noted, FUS-P525L had a high propensity to leave its normal nuclear location for the cytoplasm (see ARF related news story on Dormann et al., 2010), and that localization might be related to its early pathology.

Another paper published online by Neurology July 28 suggests FUS mutations may cause early ALS. Researchers working at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine laboratory of Teepu Siddique found several new FUS mutations in people with the late-onset form of the disease. They reported that people with FUS mutations tended to show disease at an earlier age than did people with mutations in TDP-43 or SOD1, another gene linked to ALS.—Amber Dance

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References

News Citations

1. New Gene for ALS: RNA Regulation May Be Common Culprit 27 Feb 2009
2. Going Nuclear: First Function for FUS Mutants 8 Jul 2010

Paper Citations

1. Gouveia LO, de Carvalho M. Young-onset sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: a distinct nosological entity?. Amyotroph Lateral Scler. 2007 Dec;8(6):323-7. PubMed.
2. Matsumoto S, Goto S, Kusaka H, Imai T, Murakami N, Hashizume Y, Okazaki H, Hirano A. Ubiquitin-positive inclusion in anterior horn cells in subgroups of motor neuron diseases: a comparative study of adult-onset amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, juvenile amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Werdnig-Hoffmann disease. J Neurol Sci. 1993 Apr;115(2):208-13. PubMed.
3. Kwiatkowski TJ Jr, Bosco DA, Leclerc AL, Tamrazian E, Vanderburg CR, Russ C, Davis A, Gilchrist J, Kasarskis EJ, Munsat T, Valdmanis P, Rouleau GA, Hosler BA, Cortelli P, de Jong PJ, Yoshinaga Y, Haines JL, Pericak-Vance MA, Yan J, Ticozzi N, Siddique T, McKenna-Yasek D, Sapp PC, Horvitz HR, Landers JE, Brown RH Jr. Mutations in the FUS/TLS gene on chromosome 16 cause familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Science. 2009 Feb 27;323(5918):1205-8. PubMed.
4. Chiò A, Calvo A, Moglia C, Ossola I, Brunetti M, Sbaiz L, Lai SL, Abramzon Y, Traynor BJ, Restagno G. A de novo missense mutation of the FUS gene in a "true" sporadic ALS case. Neurobiol Aging. 2011 Mar;32(3):553.e23-6. PubMed.
5. Urwin H, Josephs KA, Rohrer JD, Mackenzie IR, Neumann M, Authier A, Seelaar H, van Swieten JC, Brown JM, Johannsen P, Nielsen JE, Holm IE, , Dickson DW, Rademakers R, Graff-Radford NR, Parisi JE, Petersen RC, Hatanpaa KJ, White CL, Weiner MF, Geser F, Van Deerlin VM, Trojanowski JQ, Miller BL, Seeley WW, van der Zee J, Kumar-Singh S, Engelborghs S, De Deyn PP, Van Broeckhoven C, Bigio EH, Deng HX, Halliday GM, Kril JJ, Munoz DG, Mann DM, Pickering-Brown SM, Doodeman V, Adamson G, Ghazi-Noori S, Fisher EM, Holton JL, Revesz T, Rossor MN, Collinge J, Mead S, Isaacs AM. FUS pathology defines the majority of tau- and TDP-43-negative frontotemporal lobar degeneration. Acta Neuropathol. 2010 Jul;120(1):33-41. PubMed.
6. Dormann D, Rodde R, Edbauer D, Bentmann E, Fischer I, Hruscha A, Than ME, Mackenzie IR, Capell A, Schmid B, Neumann M, Haass C. ALS-associated fused in sarcoma (FUS) mutations disrupt Transportin-mediated nuclear import. EMBO J. 2010 Aug 18;29(16):2841-57. PubMed.

Further Reading

Papers

1. Chiò A, Calvo A, Moglia C, Ossola I, Brunetti M, Sbaiz L, Lai SL, Abramzon Y, Traynor BJ, Restagno G. A de novo missense mutation of the FUS gene in a "true" sporadic ALS case. Neurobiol Aging. 2011 Mar;32(3):553.e23-6. PubMed.
2. Millecamps S, Salachas F, Cazeneuve C, Gordon P, Bricka B, Camuzat A, Guillot-Noël L, Russaouen O, Bruneteau G, Pradat PF, Le Forestier N, Vandenberghe N, Danel-Brunaud V, Guy N, Thauvin-Robinet C, Lacomblez L, Couratier P, Hannequin D, Seilhean D, Le Ber I, Corcia P, Camu W, Brice A, Rouleau G, LeGuern E, Meininger V. SOD1, ANG, VAPB, TARDBP, and FUS mutations in familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: genotype-phenotype correlations. J Med Genet. 2010 Aug;47(8):554-60. Epub 2010 Jun 24 PubMed.
3. Matsuoka T, Fujii N, Kondo A, Iwaki A, Hokonohara T, Honda H, Sasaki K, Suzuki SO, Iwaki T. An autopsied case of sporadic adult-onset amyotrophic lateral sclerosis with FUS-positive basophilic inclusions. Neuropathology. 2011 Feb;31(1):71-6. PubMed.
4. Deng HX, Zhai H, Bigio EH, Yan J, Fecto F, Ajroud K, Mishra M, Ajroud-Driss S, Heller S, Sufit R, Siddique N, Mugnaini E, Siddique T. FUS-immunoreactive inclusions are a common feature in sporadic and non-SOD1 familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Ann Neurol. 2010 Jun;67(6):739-48. PubMed.
5. Orlacchio A, Babalini C, Borreca A, Patrono C, Massa R, Basaran S, Munhoz RP, Rogaeva EA, St George-Hyslop PH, Bernardi G, Kawarai T. SPATACSIN mutations cause autosomal recessive juvenile amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Brain. 2010 Feb;133(Pt 2):591-8. PubMed.
6. Yamanaka K, Vande Velde C, Eymard-Pierre E, Bertini E, Boespflug-Tanguy O, Cleveland DW. Unstable mutants in the peripheral endosomal membrane component ALS2 cause early-onset motor neuron disease. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2003 Dec 23;100(26):16041-6. PubMed.

News

1. Motor Neuron Disease Risk Factors: Fresh miRNA Clue, KIFAP3 Letdown 29 Jun 2010
2. Chromosome 9 Teases With Cryptic ALS/FTLD Link 13 May 2010
3. Optineurin Mutations Cause ALS, If Not Glaucoma 1 May 2010
4. Where’s the FUS?—Evidence for Sporadic ALS Role Creates Stir 21 May 2010
5. London, Ontario: The Fuss About FUS at ALS Meeting 6 Jul 2009
6. New Gene for ALS: RNA Regulation May Be Common Culprit 27 Feb 2009
7. Going Nuclear: First Function for FUS Mutants 8 Jul 2010