A young girl in the Czech Republic has inherited mostly just genes from her father, Buzzfeed News reports. It adds that she is one of about two dozen individuals known to have the condition and that she appears to be the only one who has not developed cancer because of it.
According to Buzzfeed News, the girl's condition was uncovered when her parents sought to determine the source of her deafness. She'd inherited two copies of the same variant in the ESRRB gene — but her mother didn't have that variant, Buzzfeed News adds. As researchers reported in the Journal of Human Genetics in April, they found that the girl was mosaic for paternal uniparental diploidy or isodisomy. The team from Charles University, University Hospital Motol, and the Center for Medical Genetics and Reproductive Medicine Gennet found that 93 percent of her blood cells contained solely paternal genes, as did 74 percent of cells from her saliva.
Buzzfeed News notes that the two ESRRB gene variants she inherited from her dad don't actually appear to be the cause of her deafness, as 1 in 50 Europeans have two copies of the variant without health issues.