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Allele-specific KRT1 expression is a complex trait.

ABSTRACT: The differential expression of alleles occurs commonly in humans and is likely an important genetic factor underlying heritable differences in phenotypic traits. Understanding the molecular basis of allelic expression differences is thus an important challenge. Although many genes have been shown to display differential allelic expression, this is the first study to examine in detail the cumulative effects of multiple cis-regulatory polymorphisms responsible for allele-specific expression differences. We have used a variety of experimental approaches to identify and characterize cis-regulatory polymorphisms responsible for the extreme allele-specific expression differences of keratin-1 (KRT1) in human white blood cells. The combined data from our analyses provide strong evidence that the KRT1 allelic expression differences result from the haplotypic combinations and interactions of five cis-regulatory single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) whose alleles differ in their affinity to bind transcription factors and modulate KRT1 promoter activity. Two of these cis-regulatory SNPs bind transcriptional activators with the alleles on the high-expressing KRT1 haplotype pattern having a higher affinity than the alleles on the low-expressing haplotype pattern. In contrast, the other three cis-regulatory SNPs bind transcriptional inhibitors with the alleles on the low-expressing haplotype pattern having a higher affinity than the alleles on the high-expressing haplotype pattern. Our study provides important new insights into the degree of complexity that the cis-regulatory sequences responsible for allele-specific transcriptional regulation have. These data suggest that allelic expression differences result from the cumulative contribution of multiple DNA sequence polymorphisms, with each having a small effect, and that allele-specific expression can thus be viewed as a complex trait.

SUBMITTER: Tao H

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1475705 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Sequencing the transcriptome can answer various questions such as determining the transcripts expressed in a given species for a specific tissue or condition, evaluating differential expression, discovering variants, and evaluating allele-specific expression. Differential expression evaluates the expression differences between different strains, tissues, and conditions. Allele-specific expression evaluates expression differences between parental alleles. Both differential expression and allele-specific expression have been studied for heterosis (hybrid vigor), where the hybrid has improved performance over the parents for one or more traits. The Allele Workbench software was developed for a heterosis study that evaluated allele-specific expression for a mouse F1 hybrid using libraries from multiple tissues with biological replicates. This software has been made into a distributable package, which includes a pipeline, a Java interface to build the database, and a Java interface for query and display of the results. The required input is a reference genome, annotation file, and one or more RNA-Seq libraries with optional replicates. It evaluates allelic imbalance at the SNP and transcript level and flags transcripts with significant opposite directional allele-specific expression. The Java interface allows the user to view data from libraries, replicates, genes, transcripts, exons, and variants, including queries on allele imbalance for selected libraries. To determine the impact of allele-specific SNPs on protein folding, variants are annotated with their effect (e.g., missense), and the parental protein sequences may be exported for protein folding analysis. The Allele Workbench processing results in transcript files and read counts that can be used as input to the previously published Transcriptome Computational Workbench, which has a new algorithm for determining a trimmed set of gene ontology terms. The software with demo files is available from https://code.google.com/p/allele-workbench. Additionally, all software is ready for immediate use from an Atmosphere Virtual Machine Image available from the iPlant Collaborative (www.iplantcollaborative.org).

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Allele-specific KRT1 expression is a complex trait.

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