The University of California, San Francisco, plans to sequence over the next five years 4,000 people with various forms of epilepsy to search for the genetic causes of the disorder.
The project is being funded with a $25 million grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and will be headed by Daniel Lowenstein, vice chair of the department of neurology and director of the UCSF Epilepsy Center.
The project will aim to identify causative mutations to sporadic forms of epilepsy, where the patient has no family history, and the genetic cause is thought to be a de novo mutation in the germline DNA. The study will also seek to find causative mutations for inherited epilepsy, which is thought to involve multiple genes.