In summary, our study, conducted on a group of 817 patients, did not lead to the detection of any large mutations in BARD1. Although we cannot exclude the presence of such mutations in BARD1, our results clearly indicate that these mutations do not contribute substantially (>>10% of the total BARD1 mutations) to BARD1 sequence variation and, subsequently, to familial breast and/or ovarian cancer aggregation. The gene discussed is BARD1; the disease is ovarian carcinoma.