Assessment of parental mosaicism rates in neurodevelopmental disorders caused by apparent de novo pathogenic variants using deep sequencing

While de novo variants (DNV) are overall at low risk of recurrence in subsequent pregnancies, a subset is at high risk due to parental mosaicism. Accurately identifying cases of parental mosaicism is therefore important for genetic counseling in clinical care. Some studies have investigated the rate of parental mosaics, but most were either limited by the sensitivity of the techniques (i.e. exome or genome sequencing), or focused on specific types of disease such as epileptic syndromes. This study aimed to determine the proportion of parental mosaicism among the DNV causing neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) in a series not enriched in epilepsy syndromes. We collected 189 patients with NDD-associated DNV. We applied a smMIP enrichment method and sequenced parental blood DNA samples to an average depth of 7000x. Power simulation indicated that mosaicism with an allelic fraction of 0.5% would have been detected for 87% of positions with 90% power. We observed seven parental mosaic variants (3.7% of families), of which four (2.1% of families) had an allelic fraction of less than 1%. In total, our study identifies a relatively low proportion of parental mosaicism in NDD-associated DNVs and raises the question of a biological mechanism behind the higher rates of parental mosaicism detected in other studies, particularly those focusing on epileptic syndromes.