Investigation of cryptic JAG1 splice variants as a cause of Alagille syndrome and performance evaluation of splice predictor tools

Haploinsufficiency of JAG1 is the primary cause of Alagille syndrome (ALGS), a rare, multisystem disorder. The identification of JAG1 intronic variants outside of the canonical splice region as well as missense variants, both of which lead to uncertain associations with disease, confuses diagnostics. Strategies to determine whether these variants affect splicing include the study of patient RNA or minigene constructs, which are not always available or can be laborious to design, as well as the utilization of computational splice prediction tools. These tools, including SpliceAI and Pangolin, use algorithms to calculate the probability that a variant results in a splice alteration, expressed as a Δ score, with higher Δ scores (>0.2 on a 0-1 scale) positively correlated with aberrant splicing. We studied the consequence of 10 putative splice variants in ALGS patient samples through RNA analysis and compared this to SpliceAI and Pangolin predictions. We identified eight variants with aberrant splicing, seven of which had not been previously validated. Combining these data with non-canonical and missense splice variants reported in the literature, we identified a predictive threshold for SpliceAI and Pangolin with high sensitivity (Δ score >0.6). Moreover, we showed reduced specificity for variants with low Δ scores (<0.2), highlighting a limitation of these tools that results in the misidentification of true splice variants. These results improve genomic diagnostics for ALGS by confirming splice effects for seven variants and suggest that the integration of splice prediction tools with RNA analysis is important to ensure accurate clinical variant classifications.