Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophies (DMD and BMD) are X-linked neuromuscular diseases characterized by progres-sive muscular weakness and degeneration of skeletal muscles. Approximately two-thirds of the patients have large deletionsor duplications in the dystrophin gene and the remaining one-third have point mutations. This study was performed to eval-uate point mutations in Iranian DMD/BMD male patients. A total of 29 DNA samples from patients who did not show anylarge deletion/duplication mutations following multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and multiplex ligation-dependentprobe amplification (MLPA) screening were sequenced for detection of point mutations in exons 50–79. Also exon 44 wassequenced in one sample in which a false positive deletion was detected by MLPA method. Cycle sequencing revealed fournonsense, one frameshift and two splice site mutations as well as two missense variants

The CGG repeats in the FMR1 gene expand in patients with fragile X syndrome, fragile X-associated tremour/ataxia syndrome and fragile X-associated primary ovarian failure. In this study, the CGG repeats in the FMR1 gene were studied in 449 males and 207 females using traditional polymerase chain reaction and triplet repeat primed PCR methods, also 18 CVS samples (six males and 12 females) were tested for prenatal diagnosis. Further, methylation sensitive multiplexed ligation dependent probe amplification was performed on some samples to confirm the results. Regarding the male patients, 1.1% and 9.7% had premutation (PM) and full mutation (FM) alleles, respectively. Also three (0.66%) male patients were mosaic for PM and FM alleles. Among females, 1.9% were GZ carriers and 5.8% were PM carriers. Prenatal diagnosis resulted in detection of two PM and one FM males as well as one FM carrier female. Our results were in concordance with the previously published results.