Abnormal Chromatin Folding in the Molecular Pathogenesis of Epilepsy and Autism Spectrum Disorder: a Meta-synthesis with Systematic Searching

How DNA is folded and packaged in nucleosomes is an essential regulator of gene expression. Abnormal patterns of chromatin folding are implicated in a wide range of diseases and disorders, including epilepsy and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These disorders are thought to have a shared pathogenesis involving an imbalance in the number of excitatory-inhibitory neurons formed during neurodevelopment; however, the underlying pathological mechanism behind this imbalance is poorly understood. Studies are increasingly implicating abnormal chromatin folding in neural stem cells as one of the candidate pathological mechanisms, but no review has yet attempted to summarise the knowledge in this field. This meta-synthesis is a systematic search of all the articles on epilepsy, ASD, and chromatin folding. Its two main objectives were to determine to what extent abnormal chromatin folding is implicated in the pathogenesis of epilepsy and ASD, and secondly how abnormal chromatin folding leads to pathological disease processes. This search produced 22 relevant articles, which together strongly implicate abnormal chromatin folding in the pathogenesis of epilepsy and ASD. A range of mutations and chromosomal structural abnormalities lead to this effect, including single nucleotide polymorphisms, copy number variants, translocations and mutations in chromatin modifying. However, knowledge is much more limited into how abnormal chromatin organisation subsequently causes pathological disease processes, not yet showing, for example, whether it leads to abnormal excitation-inhibitory neuron imbalance in human brain organoids.