ASTL is mutated in female infertility.

Sateesh Maddirevula, Serdar Coskun, Mashael Al-Qahtani, Omar Aboyousef, Saad Alhassan, Meshael Aldeery, Fowzan S Alkuraya

Human genetics 2022 Jan

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Female infertility is a relatively common phenotype with a growing number of single gene causes although these account for only a minority of cases. Here, we report a consanguineous family in which adult females who are homozygous for a truncating variant in ASTL display markedly reduced fertility in a pattern strikingly similar to Astl-/- female mice. ASTL encodes ovastacin, which is known to trigger zona pellucida hardening (ZPH) as part of the cortical reaction upon fertilization. ZPH is required for normal early embryonic development and its absence can be caused by pathogenic variants in other zona pellucida proteins that result in a similar infertility phenotype in humans and mouse. This is the first report of ASTL-related infertility in humans and suggests that the inclusion of ASTL in female infertility gene panels is warranted. © 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

Citation

Sateesh Maddirevula, Serdar Coskun, Mashael Al-Qahtani, Omar Aboyousef, Saad Alhassan, Meshael Aldeery, Fowzan S Alkuraya. ASTL is mutated in female infertility. Human genetics. 2022 Jan;141(1):49-54