Update on oral-facial-digital syndromes (OFDS)

Oral-facial-digital syndromes (OFDS) represent a heterogeneous group of rare developmental disorders affecting the mouth, the face and the digits. Additional signs may involve brain, kidneys and other organs thus better defining the different clinical subtypes. With the exception of OFD types I and VIII, which are X-linked, the majority of OFDS is transmitted as an autosomal recessive syndrome. A number of genes have already found to be mutated in OFDS and most of the encoded proteins are predicted or proven to be involved in primary cilia/basal body function. Preliminary data indicate a physical interaction among some of those proteins and future studies will clarify whether all OFDS proteins are part of a network functionally connected to cilia. Mutations in some of the genes can also lead to other types of ciliopathies with partially overlapping phenotypes, such as Joubert syndrome (JS) and Meckel syndrome (MKS), supporting the concept that cilia-related diseases might be a continuous spectrum of the same phenotype with different degrees of severity. To date, seven of the described OFDS still await a molecular definition and two unclassified forms need further clinical and molecular validation. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) approaches are expected to shed light on how many OFDS geneticists should consider while evaluating oral-facial-digital cases. Functional studies will establish whether the non-ciliary functions of the transcripts mutated in OFDS might contribute to any of the phenotypic abnormalities observed in OFDS. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13630-016-0034-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.