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Abstract

Pyruvate carboxylase deficiency (PCD) is caused by bi-allelic mutations of the PC gene. The reported clinical spectrum includes a neonatal form with early death (type B), an infantile fatal form (type A), and an late onset form with isolated mild intellectual delay (type C). Apart from homozygous stop-codon mutations leading to type B PCD, a genotype-phenotype correlation has not otherwise been discernible. Indeed, patients harboring bi-allelic heterozygous variants leading to PC activity near zero can present either with a fatal infantile type A or with a benign late onset type C form. In this study, we analyzed six novel patients with type A (three) and type C (three) PCD, and compared them with previously reported cases. Firstly, we observed that type C PCD is not associated to homozygous variants in PC. In-silico modeling was used to map former and novel variants associated to type A and C PCD, and to predict their potential effects on the enzyme structure and function. We found that variants lead to type A or type C phenotype based on the destabilization between the two major enzyme conformers. In general, our study on novel and previously reported patients improves the overall understanding on type A and C PCD.