Matthew Neville
@mattneville.bsky.social
93 followers 100 following 18 posts
Postdoctoral scientist @ Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. Sperm sequencing, de novo mutation, and somatic evolution.
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Reposted by Matthew Neville
mattneville.bsky.social
Huge thanks to @kerrinsmall.bsky.social and TwinsUK volunteers, @r-rahbari.bsky.social who dreamed up and supervised the project, @mehurles.bsky.social who co-supervised this project, the Martincorena & Rahbari teams and many others. Questions and feedback welcome! [17/17]
mattneville.bsky.social
These findings show the power of sperm sequencing for understanding positive selection and offspring disease risk. They also raise many new questions that we’re excited to follow up on, stay tuned for more sperm sequencing... [16/n]
mattneville.bsky.social
What about the genes which aren’t currently associated with disease? We find that 4 of them have excess loss-of-function variants in healthy populations, suggesting that they are over transmitted to offspring but are at least partially tolerated [15/n]
mattneville.bsky.social
This suggests that positive selection in spermatogenesis is driving a much broader disease risk in ageing fathers than previously appreciated. We caution however that not all disease mutations in sperm will necessarily appear in live births at the same rate [14/n]
mattneville.bsky.social
Assessing the % of sperm per individual that have a likely disease mutation in their exome, we find a striking ~3-fold enrichment over expectation. Currently, we can attribute ~55% of this enrichment to known driver mutations under positive selection [13/n]
mattneville.bsky.social
The novel genes are mostly known cancer and developmental disorder genes, but unlike previously known genes, most are enriched for loss-of-function (LOF) mutations rather than missense hotspots and they are linked to diverse pathways [12/n]
mattneville.bsky.social
We detected >35k coding mutations in sperm, equivalent to yields from sequencing >20k trios (!). Using dN/dS tests, we replicate 9 of 13 previously known genes and identify 31 novel genes under positive selection in sperm [10/n]
mattneville.bsky.social
To date 13 genes have been linked to this effect. Critically, all 13 are causal for severe developmental disorders, leading to increases (up to 1,000-fold) in the sporadic birth prevalence of these disorders, with a strong correlation to elevated age of the father [8/n]
mattneville.bsky.social
Next, we investigated positive selection of driver mutations during spermatogenesis. This effect was uncovered and has been extensively characterised by the Wilkie and @gorielylab.bsky.social groups. A summary figure of theirs here [7/n]
mattneville.bsky.social
Applying NanoSeq to 81 sperm samples from men of the TwinsUK research cohort aged 24-75 we find mutation accumulation in sperm consistent with testis sequencing (Moore et al, 2021) and gold-standard rates from trio sequencing (Sasani et al, 2019) [6/n]
mattneville.bsky.social
Trio sequencing studies have revealed much about the rates of mutation accumulation in germ cells. However, like other polyclonal tissues, assessing mutations directly in germ cells like sperm has been challenging… [4/n]
mattneville.bsky.social
Mutations accumulate in all cells over time, but those that occur in reproductive cell lineages like sperm and eggs are transmitted to offspring as germline de novo mutations [3/n]
mattneville.bsky.social
If you saw preprint, biggest two updates are: Much improved discussion + variant calls now accessible

If you'd like an accessible summary check out this great article from @mjflepage.bsky.social in New Scientist:

For science thread read on! [2/n]
institutions.newscientist.com/article/2499...
institutions.newscientist.com
Reposted by Matthew Neville