SNP Array and Genome Sequencing Demonstrated Revertant Mosaicism via Postzygotic Rescue as the Main Mechanism of Mosaic Chromosomal Terminal Duplications

ASHG Poster (2025)

PMID

Publication AuthorsWeimin Bi, PhD, Haowei Du, PhD, Sau Wai Cheung, PhD, Janice Smith, PhD, Carlos A Bacino, PhD, Claudia M.B. Carvalho, PhD, Pengfei Liu, PhD

INTRODUCTION
• Trisomy rescue is a well-known mechanism of generating a normal cell line. Here, we describe revertant mosaicism, in which all cells initially carry chromosomal structural rearrangement instead of aneuploidy, and a subset reverts to normal cells without rearrangement – resulting in a mosaic population composed of both abnormal and genetically corrected cells.
• Recognizing this mechanism reframes how we interpret mosaic structural variation in rare diseases.
• Mosaicism for a normal cell population and a pure terminal duplication is extremely rare.
• We previously reported two siblings with features of Down syndrome and mosaicism for an inherited chromosome 8 with additional chromosome 21 material attached to the end of 8q; interstitial telomeric sequences (ITS) were present at the junction. The normal cells are proposed to arise through a reversion of the abnormal chromosome 8 due to ITS instability.
• In this study, we further investigated the formation mechanism of mosaic chromosomal rearrangements.

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