The mammalian Sonic hedgehog (Shh) signalling pathway is essential for embryonic development and the patterning of multiple organs. Disruption or activation of Shh signalling leads to multiple birth defects, including holoprosencephaly, neural tube defects and polydactyly, and in adults results in tumours of the skin or central nervous system. Genetic approaches with model organisms continue to...

Canine preaxial polydactyly (PPD) in the hind limb is a developmental trait that restores the first digit lost during canine evolution. Using a linkage analysis, we previously demonstrated that the affected gene in a Korean breed is located on canine chromosome 16. The candidate locus was further limited to a linkage disequilibrium (LD) block of <213 kb composing the single gene, LMBR1, by LD m...

Disease characteristics. Townes-Brocks syndrome (TBS) is characterized by the triad of imperforate anus (82%), dysplastic ears (88%) (overfolded superior helices and preauricular tags) frequently associated with sensorineural and/or conductive hearing impairment (65%), and thumb malformations (89%) (triphalangeal thumbs, duplication of the thumb (preaxial polydactyly), and rarely hypoplasia of ...

Preaxial polydactyly (PPD) is congenital hand malformation characterized by the duplication of digit. Herein, we scan the genome-wide SNPs for a large Chinese family with PPD-II/III. We employ the refined IBD algorithm to identify the identity-by-decent (IBD) segments and compare the frequency among the patients and normal relatives. A total of 72 markers of 0.01 percentile of the permutation a...

Sonic hedgehog (Shh) expression during limb development is crucial for specifying the identity and number of digits. The spatial pattern of Shh expression is restricted to a region called the zone of polarizing activity (ZPA), and this expression is controlled from a long distance by the cis-regulator ZRS. Here, members of two groups of ETS transcription factors are shown to act directly at the...

BACKGROUND The intron 5 of gene LMBR1 is the cis-acting regulatory module for the sonic hedgehog (SHH) gene. Mutation in this non-coding region is associated with preaxial polydactyly, and may play crucial roles in the evolution of limb and skeletal system. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We sequenced a region of the LMBR1 gene intron 5 in East Asian human population, and found a significant d...

This case report presents a case of Fanconi's Anemia with an unusual thumb polydactyly in a 2-year-old boy. The extra thumb had no nail, nail bed and distal phalanx. The extra thumb had no active motion. The duplication of the thumb occurred at the carpometacarpal joint but its morphology did not match with any classification described for thumb polydactyly. Although his thumb polydactyly was a...

INTRODUCTION "On-top" and "side-to-side" plasties are techniques used for treating thumb duplications in which one thumb is adequate proximally and the other thumb contains a better pulp and nail distally. The detailed functional results of these techniques have not been reported in the literature. We report on two cases. PRESENTATION OF CASES The first case had Wassel type VI duplication. Th...