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Dey KK, Gazal S, van de Geijn B, Kim SS, Nasser J, Engreitz JM, Price AL. SNP-to-gene linking strategies reveal contributions of enhancer-related and candidate master-regulator genes to autoimmune disease. Cell Genom 2022; 2:100145. [PMID: 35873673 PMCID: PMC9306342 DOI: 10.1016/j.xgen.2022.100145] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/11/2022]
Abstract
We assess contributions to autoimmune disease of genes whose regulation is driven by enhancer regions (enhancer-related) and genes that regulate other genes in trans (candidate master-regulator). We link these genes to SNPs using several SNP-to-gene (S2G) strategies and apply heritability analyses to draw three conclusions about 11 autoimmune/blood-related diseases/traits. First, several characterizations of enhancer-related genes using functional genomics data are informative for autoimmune disease heritability after conditioning on a broad set of regulatory annotations. Second, candidate master-regulator genes defined using trans-eQTL in blood are also conditionally informative for autoimmune disease heritability. Third, integrating enhancer-related and master-regulator gene sets with protein-protein interaction (PPI) network information magnified their disease signal. The resulting PPI-enhancer gene score produced >2-fold stronger heritability signal and >2-fold stronger enrichment for drug targets, compared with the recently proposed enhancer domain score. In each case, functionally informed S2G strategies produced 4.1- to 13-fold stronger disease signals than conventional window-based strategies.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kushal K. Dey
- Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA
- Corresponding author
| | - Steven Gazal
- Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA
| | - Bryce van de Geijn
- Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA
- Genentech, South San Francisco, CA 94080, USA
| | - Samuel Sungil Kim
- Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA
- Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
| | - Joseph Nasser
- Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA
| | - Jesse M. Engreitz
- Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
- BASE Initiative, Betty Irene Moore Children’s Heart Center, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94304, USA
- Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA
| | - Alkes L. Price
- Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA
- Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA
- Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA
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