[Comparison study of whole exome sequencing and targeted panel sequencing in molecular diagnosis of inherited retinal dystrophies].

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate and compare whole exome sequencing (WES) and targeted panel sequencing in the clinical molecular diagnosis of the Chinese families affected with inherited retinal dystrophies (IRDs). METHODS: ORF15 was difficult to capture by next generation sequencing (NGS), all the samples were subjected to Sanger sequencing for this region. All sequence changes identified by NGS were classified according to the American College of Medical Gene-tics and Genomics and the Association for Molecular Pathology (ACMG/AMP) variant interpretation guidelines. In this study, only variants identified as pathogenic or likely pathogenic were included, while those variants of uncertain significance, likely benign or benign were not included. RESULTS: ORF15. CONCLUSION: NGS in conjunction with Sanger sequencing offers a reliable and effective approach for the genetic diagnosis of IRDs, and after evaluating the pros and cons of the two sequencing methods, we conclude that HEDEP should be used as a first-tier test for IRDs patients, WES can be used as a supplementary molecular diagnostic method due to its merit of detecting novel IRD-associated genes if HEDEP or other methods could not detect disease-causing va-riants in reported genes. In addition, our results enriched the mutational spectra of IRDs genes, and our methods paves the way of genetic counselling, family planning and up-coming gene-based therapies for these families.