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Letter

Genomic deletion of a long-range bone enhancer misregulates sclerostin in Van Buchem disease

¹ Life Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA ² Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Bone and Cartilage, Basel, Switzerland ³ DOE, Joint Genome Institute, Walnut Creek, California 94598, USA ⁴ Genome Biology Division, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Livermore, California 94550, USA

Mutations in distant regulatory elements can have a negative impact on human development and health, yet because of the difficulty of detecting these critical sequences, we predominantly focus on coding sequences for diagnostic purposes. We have undertaken a comparative sequence-based approach to characterize a large noncoding region deleted in patients affected by Van Buchem (VB) disease, a severe sclerosing bone dysplasia. Using BAC recombination and transgenesis, we characterized the expression of human sclerostin (SOST) from normal (SOST^wt) or Van Buchem (SOST^vb) alleles. Only the SOST^wt allele faithfully expressed high levels of human SOST in the adult bone and had an impact on bone metabolism, consistent with the model that the VB noncoding deletion removes a SOST-specific regulatory element. By exploiting cross-species sequence comparisons with in vitro and in vivo enhancer assays, we were able to identify a candidate enhancer element that drives human SOST expression in osteoblast-like cell lines in vitro and in the skeletal anlage of the embryonic day 14.5 (E14.5) mouse embryo, and discovered a novel function for sclerostin during limb development. Our approach represents a framework for characterizing distant regulatory elements associated with abnormal human phenotypes.

⁵ Corresponding author.
E-mail loots1{at}llnl.gov; fax (925) 422-2099.

[Supplemental material is available online at www.genome.org. The following individuals kindly provided reagents, samples, or unpublished information as indicated in the paper: B. Black, B. Fournier, M. Brunkow, and D. Winkler.]

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