Project description:Asthma is caused by a combination of poorly understood genetic and environmental factors. We found multiple markers on chromosome 17q21 to be strongly and reproducibly associated with childhood onset asthma in family and case-referent panels with a combined P < 10-12. In independent replication studies the 17q21 locus showed strong association with diagnosis of childhood asthma in 2,320 subjects from a cohort of German children (P = 0.0003) and in 3,301 subjects from the British 1958 Birth Cohort (P = 0.0005). We systematically evaluated the relationships between markers of the 17q21 locus and transcript levels of genes in EBV-transformed lymphoblastoid cell lines from children in the asthma family panel used in our association study. The SNPs associated with childhood asthma were consistently and strongly associated (P <10-22) in cis with transcript levels of ORMDL3, a member of a gene family that encode transmembrane proteins anchored in the endoplasmic reticulum. The results indicate that genetic variants regulating ORMDL3 expression are determinants of susceptibility to childhood asthma. Experiment Overall Design: Gene expression levels were evaluated in 404 children. We then evaluated the relationship between SNPs in the 17q21 region (which show association to asthma in the same children) with gene expression levels. See http://www.sph.umich.edu/csg/liang/asthma/
Project description:Asthma is caused by a combination of poorly understood genetic and environmental factors. We found multiple markers on chromosome 17q21 to be strongly and reproducibly associated with childhood onset asthma in family and case-referent panels with a combined P < 10-12. In independent replication studies the 17q21 locus showed strong association with diagnosis of childhood asthma in 2,320 subjects from a cohort of German children (P = 0.0003) and in 3,301 subjects from the British 1958 Birth Cohort (P = 0.0005). We systematically evaluated the relationships between markers of the 17q21 locus and transcript levels of genes in EBV-transformed lymphoblastoid cell lines from children in the asthma family panel used in our association study. The SNPs associated with childhood asthma were consistently and strongly associated (P <10-22) in cis with transcript levels of ORMDL3, a member of a gene family that encode transmembrane proteins anchored in the endoplasmic reticulum. The results indicate that genetic variants regulating ORMDL3 expression are determinants of susceptibility to childhood asthma. Keywords: association study, global gene expression, asthma, ORMDL3
Project description:Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified a number of novel genetic associations with complex human diseases. In spite of these successes, results from GWAS generally explain only a small proportion of disease heritability, an observation termed the M-bM-^@M-^\missing heritability problem.M-bM-^@M-^] Several sources for the missing heritability have been proposed, including the contribution of many common variants with small individual effect sizes, which cannot be reliably found using the standard GWAS approach. The goal of our study was to explore a complementary approach, which combines GWAS results with functional data in order to identify novel genetic associations with small effect sizes. To do so, we conducted a GWAS for lymphocyte count, a physiologic quantitative trait associated with asthma, in 462 Hutterites. In parallel, we performed a genome-wide gene expression study in lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) from 96 Hutterites. We found significant support for genetic associations using the GWAS data when we considered variants near the 193 genes whose expression levels across individuals were most correlated with lymphocyte counts. Interestingly, these variants are also enriched with signatures of an association with asthma susceptibility, an observation we were able to replicate. The associated loci include genes previously implicated in asthma susceptibility, as well as novel candidate genes enriched for functions related to T cell receptor signaling and ATP synthesis. Our results, therefore, establish a new set of asthma susceptibility candidate genes. More generally, our observations support the notion that many loci of small effects influence variation in lymphocyte count and asthma susceptibility. 96 RNA samples were collected (1 subsequently excluded) from lymphoblastoid cell lines derived from Hutterite subjects chosen to represent the extremes of absolute lymphocyte count. The high and low absolute lymphocyte count groups were balanced with respect to age, gender, and relatedness.
Project description:To investigate mechanisms underlying frequent asthma exacerbation, we profiled the nasal transcriptome of both frequent and non-frequent asthma exacerbators.
Project description:Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified a number of novel genetic associations with complex human diseases. In spite of these successes, results from GWAS generally explain only a small proportion of disease heritability, an observation termed the “missing heritability problem.” Several sources for the missing heritability have been proposed, including the contribution of many common variants with small individual effect sizes, which cannot be reliably found using the standard GWAS approach. The goal of our study was to explore a complementary approach, which combines GWAS results with functional data in order to identify novel genetic associations with small effect sizes. To do so, we conducted a GWAS for lymphocyte count, a physiologic quantitative trait associated with asthma, in 462 Hutterites. In parallel, we performed a genome-wide gene expression study in lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) from 96 Hutterites. We found significant support for genetic associations using the GWAS data when we considered variants near the 193 genes whose expression levels across individuals were most correlated with lymphocyte counts. Interestingly, these variants are also enriched with signatures of an association with asthma susceptibility, an observation we were able to replicate. The associated loci include genes previously implicated in asthma susceptibility, as well as novel candidate genes enriched for functions related to T cell receptor signaling and ATP synthesis. Our results, therefore, establish a new set of asthma susceptibility candidate genes. More generally, our observations support the notion that many loci of small effects influence variation in lymphocyte count and asthma susceptibility.
Project description:Background: Asthma is common chronic inflammatory disease of the airways with a heterogenous clinical presentation. Individual differences in asthma susceptibility remain poorly understood, although genetics is thought to play a major role. Aim: To build a polygenic risk score (PRS) for asthma and determine whether predictive genetic variants can be epigenomically linked to specific pathophysiological mechanisms. Methods: PRSs were constructed using data from genome-wide association studies and performance was validated using data generated in the Rotterdam Study, a Dutch prospective cohort of 14,926 individuals. Outcomes used were asthma, childhood-onset asthma, adulthood-onset asthma, eosinophilic asthma and exacerbations. Chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by high-throughput sequencing (ChIP-Seq) data from 14 primary cell types, including lung epithelial cells and T lymphocytes was used for epigenomic PRS partitioning. Results: All PRSs successfully predicted risk to develop asthma and related outcomes, with the strongest predictive power (2.42 odds ratios per PRS standard deviation, area under the curve of 0.736) achieved for childhood-onset asthma. PRSs allowed for stratification of the Rotterdam Study cohort into groups at low or high risk to develop asthma. PRS partitioning using genome-wide epigenomic profiles identified 5 clusters of variants within gene regulatory regions linked to specific asthma-relevant cells, genes and biological pathways. Conclusions: PRSs can predict whether individuals in a Dutch cohort developed asthma and asthma-related phenotypes, which is most effective for childhood-onset asthma. Importantly, we show that PRS partitioning based on epigenomics data dissects a genetic risk score into blocks of regulatory variants with differential predictive power, which likely represent distinct genetically driven disease pathways. These findings have potential implications for personalized risk mitigation and treatment strategies.
Project description:We have combined high-quality genome sequencing and RNA-sequencing data within a 17-individual, three generation family. Using these data, we have contrasted cis-acting expression, allele-specific expression and splicing quantitative trait loci (collectively termed eQTLs) within the family to eQTLs discovered within a cell-type and ethnicity-matched population sample. We identified that eQTL that exhibit larger effects in the family compared to the population are enriched for rare regulatory and splicing variants and were more likely to influence essential genes. In addition, we identify several large effect-size eQTLs within the family for genes involved in complex disease. Through analysis of eQTLs in a large family we also report the utility of non-coding genome annotation to predicting the effect of rare non-coding variants. We find that a combination of distance to the transcription start site, evolutionary constraint and epigenetic annotation is considerably more informative for predicting the consequence of rare non-coding variants than for common variants. In summary, through transcriptome analyses within a large family we are able to identify the contribution of rare non-coding variants to expression phenotypes and further demonstrate the predictive potential of diverse non-coding genome annotation for interpretation of the impact of rare non-coding variants. RNA-Sequencing of CEPH/UTAH family 1463