Project description:Most of the millions of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the human genome are non-coding, and many overlap with putative regulatory elements. Genome-wide association studies have linked many of these SNPs to human traits or to gene expression levels, but rarely with sufficient resolution to identify the causal SNPs. Functional screens based on reporter assays have previously been of insufficient throughput to test the vast space of SNPs for possible effects on enhancer and promoter activity. Here, we have leveraged the throughput of the SuRE reporter technology to survey a total of 5.9 million SNPs, including 57% of the known common SNPs world-wide. We identified more than 30 thousand SNPs that alter the activity of putative regulatory elements, often in a cell-type specific manner. These data indicate that a large proportion of human non-coding SNPs may affect gene regulation. Integration of these SuRE data with genome-wide association studies may help to identify causal SNPs.
Project description:Genome-wide association studies implicate multiple loci in risk for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), but few contain exonic variants, rendering systematic identification of non-coding variants essential to decoding SLE genetics. We utilized SNP-seq and bioinformatic enrichment to interrogate 2180 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from 87 SLE risk loci for potential binding of transcription factors and related proteins from B cells. 52 SNPs that passed initial screening were tested by electrophoretic mobility shift (EMSA) and luciferase reporter assays. To identify binding of transcription factors and/or other nuclear proteins in an allele-determined manner, we employed pulldown using nuclear extract from Daudi cells and silver staining in SNPs that had exhibited allele-specific differential binding by EMSA. Each pulldown product for each allele of the five high-probability SNPs (rs2297550 C/G, rs13213604 C/G, rs276461 T/C, rs9907955 C/T, rs7302634 T/C) was evaluated by mass spectrometry (MS) to identify binding nuclear proteins, yielding a set of candidate proteins for each.
Project description:We tested >13,000 sequences containing each allele of 6,628 SNPs associated with altered in vivo chromatin accessibility in human islets and/or type 2 diabetes risk (T2D GWAS SNPs) for transcriptional activity in ß cell under steady state and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress conditions using the massively parallel reporter assay (MPRA).
Project description:We adapted the DiR barcode-based parallel reporter assay systems strategy to systematically identify the SNPs that affect gene expression by modulating activities of regulatory elements. Among 293 SNPs linked with GWAS-identified prostate cancer-risk SNPs, we found 32, 9, and 11 regulatory SNPs in 22Rv1, PC-3, and LNCaP cells. Further mechanism study indicates that one SNP regulates gene expression in prostate cancer malignancy. The DiR system has great potential to advance the functional study of risk SNPs that have associations with polygenic diseases. Our findings hold great promise in benefiting prostate cancer patients with prognostic prediction.
Project description:The majority of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with insulin resistance (IR)-relevant phenotypes by genome-wide association studies (GWASs) are located in noncoding regions, complicating their functional interpretation. Here, we utilized an adapted STARR-seq to systematically detect regulatory activity of 5,987 noncoding GWASs SNPs in three IR-relevant cell lines. We identified 876 SNPs with biased allelic enhancer activity across 133 loci, and further uncovered the genetic regulatory mechanisms underlying functional SNPs through integrating multi-omics analyses.