ClinVar

Description

The c.1129C>T; p.Arg377Cys variant has been reported multiple times in the literature. An African-American/Caucasian female with lethargy and failure to thrive at one month of age, and seizures, apnea, and hypotonia at three months of age was reported to be compound heterozygous for this variant as well as p.Leu323Pro (Goyette 1996). A 13-year-old male with developmental delay was reported to be compound heterozygous for the p.Arg377Cys and p.Met338Thr variants (Sibani 2003), and a study of families diagnosed with severe MTHFR deficiency reported two further individuals heterozygous for p.Arg377Cys and either p.His181Asp or p.Cys193Tyr (Tonetti 2003). A study of an Amish community found four children homozygous for the p.Arg377Cys variant, all of whom had slow head growth and arrested development in the first few months of life; while 68 heterozygotes were among 230 healthy individuals in the community, for an estimated population carrier frequency of 30% (Strauss 2007). The four p.Arg377Cys homozygotes all displayed elevated plasma N-homocysteinylated protein, Hcy-thiolactone and total homocysteine concentrations (Jakubowski 2008). This variant is listed in the genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) with an overall population frequency of 0.004% (identified on 5 out of 126,714 chromosomes) and an East Asian population frequency of zero (out of 18,870 chromosomes), while the Exome Sequencing Project reports the variant frequency as 0.008% (identified on 1 out of 13,005 chromosomes). However, a study of congenital heart disease risk in China identified the p.Arg377Cys variant in a homozygous state in 12 healthy individuals and 27 affected patients among 467 studied Chinese Han individuals, with an allele frequency of over 25% (Zhang 2014). The discrepancy between this report and those of the population databases has not yet been explained. Although these findings are suggestive, based on the available evidence, the clinical significance of the p.Arg377Cys variant cannot be determined with certainty.