Autosomal dominant optic atrophy (DOA) is an inherited optic neuropathy that results in progressive, bilateral visual acuity loss and field defects. OPA1 is the causative gene in around 60% of cases of DOA. The majority of patients have a pure ocular phenotype, but 20% have extra-ocular features (DOA +). We report on a patient with DOA + manifesting as bilateral optic atrophy, spastic paraparesis, urinary incontinence and white matter changes in the central nervous system associated with a novel heterozygous splice variant NM_015560.2(OPA1):c.2356-1 G > T. Further characterisation, which was performed using fibroblasts obtained from a skin biopsy, demonstrated that this variant altered mRNA splicing of the OPA1 transcript, specifically a 21 base pair deletion at the start of exon 24, NM_015560.2(OPA1):p.Cys786_Lys792del. The majority of variant transcripts were shown to escape nonsense-mediated decay and modelling of the predicted protein structure suggests that the in-frame 7 amino acid deletion may affect OPA1 oligomerisation. Fibroblasts carrying the c.2356-1 G > T variant demonstrated impaired mitochondrial bioenergetics, membrane potential, increased cell death, and disrupted and fragmented mitochondrial networks in comparison to WT cells. This study suggests that the c.2356-1 G > T OPA1 splice site variant leads to a cryptic splice site activation and may manifest in a dominant-negative manner, which could account for the patient's severe syndromic phenotype.
© 2022. The Author(s).