Assessing variants of uncertain significance implicated in hearing loss using a comprehensive deafness proteome

Hearing loss is the leading sensory deficit, affecting ~ 5% of the population. It exhibits remarkable heterogeneity across 223 genes with 6328 pathogenic missense variants, making deafness-specific expertise a prerequisite for ascribing phenotypic consequences to genetic variants. Deafness-implicated variants are curated in the Deafness Variation Database (DVD) after classification by a genetic hearing loss expert panel and thorough informatics pipeline. However, seventy percent of the 128,167 missense variants in the DVD are “variants of uncertain significance” (VUS) due to insufficient evidence for classification. Here, we use the deep learning protein prediction algorithm, AlphaFold2, to curate structures for all DVD genes. We refine these structures with global optimization and the AMOEBA force field and use DDGun3D to predict folding free energy differences (∆∆G(Fold)) for all DVD missense variants. We find that 5772 VUSs have a large, destabilizing ∆∆G(Fold) that is consistent with pathogenic variants. When also filtered for CADD scores (> 25.7), we determine 3456 VUSs are likely pathogenic at a probability of 99.0%. Of the 224 genes in the DVD, 166 genes (74%) exhibit one or more missense variants predicted to cause a pathogenic change in protein folding stability. The VUSs prioritized here affect 119 patients (~ 3% of cases) sequenced by the OtoSCOPE targeted panel. Approximately half of these patients previously received an inconclusive report, and reclassification of these VUSs as pathogenic provides a new genetic diagnosis for six patients. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00439-023-02559-9.