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Fine-mapping and cell-specific enrichment at corneal resistance factor loci prioritize candidate causal regulatory variants.

ABSTRACT: Corneal resistance factor (CRF) is altered during corneal diseases progression. Genome-wide-association studies (GWAS) indicated potential CRF and disease genetics overlap. Here, we characterise 135 CRF loci following GWAS in 76029 UK Biobank participants. Enrichment of extra-cellular matrix gene-sets, genetic correlation with corneal thickness (70% (SE?=?5%)), reported keratoconus risk variants at 13 loci, all support relevance to corneal stroma biology. Fine-mapping identifies a subset of 55 highly likely causal variants, 91% of which are non-coding. Genomic features enrichments, using all associated variants, also indicate prominent regulatory causal role. We newly established open chromatin landscapes in two widely-used human cornea immortalised cell lines using ATAC-seq. Variants associated with CRF were significantly enriched in regulatory regions from the corneal stroma-derived cell line and enrichment increases to over 5 fold for variants prioritised by fine-mapping-including at GAS7, SMAD3 and COL6A1 loci. Our analysis generates many hypotheses for future functional validation of aetiological mechanisms.

SUBMITTER: Jiang X

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7732848 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Fine-mapping and cell-specific enrichment at corneal resistance factor loci prioritize candidate causal regulatory variants.

Jiang Xinyi X Dellepiane Nefeli N Pairo-Castineira Erola E Boutin Thibaud T Kumar Yatendra Y Bickmore Wendy A WA Vitart Veronique V

Communications biology 20201211 1

Corneal resistance factor (CRF) is altered during corneal diseases progression. Genome-wide-association studies (GWAS) indicated potential CRF and disease genetics overlap. Here, we characterise 135 CRF loci following GWAS in 76029 UK Biobank participants. Enrichment of extra-cellular matrix gene-sets, genetic correlation with corneal thickness (70% (SE = 5%)), reported keratoconus risk variants at 13 loci, all support relevance to corneal stroma biology. Fine-mapping identifies a subset of 55 h ...[more]

PMID: 33311554

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Project description:Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the leading cause of mortality and morbidity driven by both genetic and environmental risk factors. Meta-analyses of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified multiple single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with CAD and myocardial infarction (MI) susceptibility in multi-ethnic populations. The majority of these variants reside in non-coding regulatory regions and are co-inherited with hundreds of candidate regulatory SNPs. Herein, we use integrative genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic fine-mapping in human coronary artery smooth muscle cells (HCASMC) and tissues to identify causal regulatory variation and mechanisms responsible for CAD associations. Using these genome-wide maps we prioritize 65 candidate variants and perform allele-specific binding and expression analyses on 7 top candidates. We validate our findings in two independent cohorts of diseased human arterial expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL), which together demonstrate fundamental links between CAD associations and regulatory function in the appropriate disease context. We performed ATAC-seq, ChIP-seq, and RNA-seq on human coronary artery smooth muscle cells grown in SmGM-2 Smooth Muscle Growth Medium-2 including hEGF, insulin, hFGF-B and FBS, but without antibiotics (Lonza, #CC-3182). For ATAC-seq and RNA-seq we performed stimulations with growth factors (TGF-B1, PDGF-BB, PDGF-DD) versus serum-free control. We conducted two biological replicates for each condition using independent donors. For ATAC-seq experiments, sequencing was completed on an Illumina Hiseq 2500, paired-end 50bp reads. For ChIP-seq we performed immunoprecipitations using H3K27ac (Abcam ab4729). We conducted two biological replicates using HCASMC from independent donors, and also did an IgG control for these studies. For RNA-seq we also conducted two replicates using HCASMC from independent donors. For both ChIP-seq and RNA-seq experiments, sequencing was completed on an Illumina HiSeq 2500, paired-end 100bp reads. We also performed ex-vivo ATAC-seq on frozen tissues (isolated media) from normal and atherosclerotic human coronary arteries, using three independent donors for each. Sequencing was also completed on an Illumina HiSeq 2500, paired end 50bp reads.

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Fine-mapping and cell-specific enrichment at corneal resistance factor loci prioritize candidate causal regulatory variants.

Publications

Fine-mapping and cell-specific enrichment at corneal resistance factor loci prioritize candidate causal regulatory variants.

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