The outcome of the conference was the generation of 33 recommendations for the diagnosis and management of HHT, with at least 80% agreement amongst the expert panel for 30 of the 33 recommendations.

Several techniques have recently been developed to detect single-base mismatches in DNA heteroduplexes that contain one strand of wild-type and one strand of mutated DNA. Here we tested the hypothesis that an appropriate system of mildly denaturing solvents can amplify the tendency of single-base mismatches to produce conformational changes, such as bends in the double helix, and thereby increase the differential migration of DNA heteroduplexes and homoduplexes during gel electrophoresis. The best separations of heteroduplexes and homoduplexes were obtained with a standard 6% polyacrylamide gel polymerized in 10% ethylene glycol/15% formamide/Tris-taurine buffer. As predicted by the hypothesis of solvent-induced bends, when the concentration of either ethylene glycol or formamide was increased, the differential migration decreased. Also, single-base mismatches within 50 bp of one end of a heteroduplex did not produce differential migration. Sixty of 68 single-base mismatches in a series of PCR products were detected in some 59 different sequence contexts. The eight mismatches not detected were either within 50 bp of the nearest end of the PCR product or in isolated high-melting-temperature domains. Therefore, it was possible to predict in advance the end regions and sequence contexts in which mismatches may be difficult to detect. The procedure can be applied to any PCR products of 200-800 bp and requires no special equipment or preparation of samples.

Among women with breast cancer and a family history of the disease, the percentage with BRCA1 coding-region mutations is less than the 45 percent predicted by genetic-linkage analysis. These results suggest that even in a referral clinic specializing in screening women from high-risk families, the majority of tests for BRCA1 mutations will be negative and therefore uninformative.

Genotype to phenotype correlations were most successful in children with GLUD1, GCK, and recessive KATP mutations. Correlations were complicated by the high frequency of novel missense KATP mutations that were uncharacterized, because such defects might be either recessive or dominant and, if dominant, be either responsive or unresponsive to diazoxide. Accurate and timely prediction of phenotype based on genotype is critical to limit exposure to persistent hypoglycemia in infants and children with congenital HI.