Genetic Mosaicism as a Cause of Inborn Errors of Immunity

Inborn errors of immunity (IEIs) are a heterogeneous group of disorders due to genetic defects in the immune response that have a broad clinical spectrum. Diagnosis of the precise genetic cause of IEI has led to improved care and treatment of patients; however, genetic diagnosis using standard approaches is only successful in ~40% of patients and is particularly challenging in “sporadic” cases without a family history. Standard genetic testing for IEI evaluates for germline changes in genes encoding proteins important for the immune response. It is now clear that IEI can also arise from de novo mutations leading to genetic variants present in germ cells and/or somatic cells. In particular, somatic mosaicism, i.e., post-zygotic genetic changes in DNA sequence, is emerging as a significant contributor to IEI. Testing for somatic mosaicism can be challenging, and both older sequencing techniques such as Sanger sequencing and newer next-generation sequencing may not be sensitive enough to detect variants depending on the platform and analysis tools used. Investigation of multiple tissue samples and specifically targeting sequence technologies to detect low frequency variants is important for detection of variants. This review examines the role and functional consequences of genetic mosaicism in IEI. We emphasize the need to refine the current exome and genome analysis pipeline to efficiently identify mosaic variants and recommend considering somatic mosaicism in disease discovery and in the first-tier of genetic analysis.