Prevalence of myocilin and optineurin sequence variants in German normal tension glaucoma patients.

PURPOSE: To determine the prevalence of optineurin (OPTN) and myocilin (MYOC) sequence variants in a cohort of German patients with normal tension glaucoma.
METHODS: All coding exons of the OPTN and MYOC genes were amplified by PCR from genomic DNA and subjected to direct DNA sequencing. Analysis of sequence variants in controls was done by denaturing high performance liquid chromatography (DHPLC) and restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis.
RESULTS: Sequence variants were identified by DNA sequencing in 10 of 112 cases. The OPTN sequence variant M98K was found in seven patients. In addition, two novel sequence variants (A336G and A377T) in the OPTN gene were identified that were not present in a control group. Mutation screening also identified two potentially pathogenic MYOC mutations (T293K and A445V).
CONCLUSIONS: The findings in the current study provide further evidence that MYOC and OPTN gene variants are rare causes of NTG.