In addition, encephaloceles are often observed to be associated with other human birth defects, including other NTDs, cleft palate, craniosynostosis (Naidich et al., 1992; Caplan et al., 2002; Ganapathy et al., 2014), which are similar phenotypes to those observed in mouse models with Gpr161 cKO or Rac1 cKO (Rolo et al., 2019). This evidence concerns the gene GPR161 and craniosynostosis.