Disruption of endocytic trafficking in frontotemporal dementia with CHMP2B mutations.

Mutations in CHMP2B cause frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in a large Danish pedigree, which is termed FTD linked to chromosome 3 (FTD-3), and also in an unrelated familial FTD patient. CHMP2B is a component of the ESCRT-III complex, which is required for function of the multivesicular body (MVB), an endosomal structure that fuses with the lysosome to degrade endocytosed proteins. We report a novel endosomal pathology in CHMP2B mutation-positive patient brains and also identify and characterize abnormal endosomes in patient fibroblasts. Functional studies demonstrate a specific disruption of endosome-lysosome fusion but not protein sorting by the MVB. We provide evidence for a mechanism for impaired endosome-lysosome fusion whereby mutant CHMP2B constitutively binds to MVBs and prevents recruitment of proteins necessary for fusion to occur, such as Rab7. The fusion of endosomes with lysosomes is required for neuronal function and the data presented therefore suggest a pathogenic mechanism for FTD caused by CHMP2B mutations.

CHMP2B C-truncating mutations in frontotemporal lobar degeneration are associated with an aberrant endosomal phenotype in vitro.

The charged multivesicular body protein 2B gene (CHMP2B) was recently associated with frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) linked to chromosome 3 in a Danish FTLD family (FTD-3). In this family, a mutation in the acceptor splice site of exon 6 produced two aberrant transcripts predicting two C-truncated CHMP2B proteins due to a read through of intron 5 (p.Met178ValfsX2) and a cryptic splicing event within exon 6 (p.Met178LeufsX30). Extensive mutation analysis of CHMP2B in Belgian patients (N = 146) identified one nonsense mutation in exon 5 (c.493C>T) in a familial FTLD patient, predicting a C-truncated protein p.Gln165X analogous to the Danish mutant proteins. Overexpression of Belgian p.Gln165X in human neuroblastoma SK-N-SH cells showed the formation of large, aberrant endosomal structures that were highly similar to those observed for Danish p.Met178ValfsX2. Together, these data suggest that C-truncating mutations in CHMP2B might underlie the pathogenic mechanism in FTLD by disturbing endosome function. We also describe a missense mutation in exon 5 of CHMP2B (p.Asn143Ser) in a familial patient with cortical basal degeneration. However, the pathogenic character of this mutation remains elusive.