Identification of Duchenne muscular dystrophy female carriers by fluorescence in situ hybridization and RT-PCR

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is an X-linked recessive neuromuscular disorder caused by mutations in the dystrophin DMD gene located at Xp21.1 region. Up to 65% of the patients present dystrophin gene deletions. Mothers of DMD patients have a two-thirds chance of carrying a dystrophin mutation. The female carrier will transmit the disease gene to half of her sons and half of her daughters. As the recurrence risk for the disease is extremely high, it is very important to detect carrier status among female relatives of the patients to bring an adequate genetic counseling. In this work, results from two methods to identify female carriers are presented. One method is a multicolor fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) assay, and the other is reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). We showed that FISH is an efficient, sensitive method that brings confident results to detect DMD female carriers as compared to RT-PCR.