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Editor’s note: Although there has been progress in identifying genes for the few, rare types of epilepsy that run strongly in families (i.e. mendelian epilepsy), there has been little progress in identifying the genetic factors of susceptibility to the more common forms of the disease. Some, but not all, of the genes for mendelian epilepsy encode subunits for ion channels, gated either by voltage or ligand. Therefore, ion channel genes are good candidates for rare mutations that arise sporadically and cause common forms of epilepsy with no family history. Recent developments in high-throughput DNA sequencing now permit the identification of mutations by sequencing the genomes of large numbers of people with and without a disease of interest, and this article is the first to report on such large-scale sequencing efforts in epilepsy.