ALBERT

Description: A major challenge in human genetics is to devise a systematic strategy to integrate disease-associated variants with diverse genomic and biological data sets to provide insight into disease pathogenesis and guide drug discovery for complex traits such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Here we performed a genome-wide association study meta-analysis in a total of 〉100,000 subjects of European and Asian ancestries (29,880 RA cases and 73,758 controls), by evaluating approximately 10 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms. We discovered 42 novel RA risk loci at a genome-wide level of significance, bringing the total to 101 (refs 2 - 4). We devised an in silico pipeline using established bioinformatics methods based on functional annotation, cis-acting expression quantitative trait loci and pathway analyses--as well as novel methods based on genetic overlap with human primary immunodeficiency, haematological cancer somatic mutations and knockout mouse phenotypes--to identify 98 biological candidate genes at these 101 risk loci. We demonstrate that these genes are the targets of approved therapies for RA, and further suggest that drugs approved for other indications may be repurposed for the treatment of RA. Together, this comprehensive genetic study sheds light on fundamental genes, pathways and cell types that contribute to RA pathogenesis, and provides empirical evidence that the genetics of RA can provide important information for drug discovery.〈br /〉〈br /〉〈a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3944098/" target="_blank"〉〈img src="https://static.pubmed.gov/portal/portal3rc.fcgi/4089621/img/3977009" border="0"〉〈/a〉   〈a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3944098/" target="_blank"〉This paper as free author manuscript - peer-reviewed and accepted for publication〈/a〉〈br /〉〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Okada, Yukinori -- Wu, Di -- Trynka, Gosia -- Raj, Towfique -- Terao, Chikashi -- Ikari, Katsunori -- Kochi, Yuta -- Ohmura, Koichiro -- Suzuki, Akari -- Yoshida, Shinji -- Graham, Robert R -- Manoharan, Arun -- Ortmann, Ward -- Bhangale, Tushar -- Denny, Joshua C -- Carroll, Robert J -- Eyler, Anne E -- Greenberg, Jeffrey D -- Kremer, Joel M -- Pappas, Dimitrios A -- Jiang, Lei -- Yin, Jian -- Ye, Lingying -- Su, Ding-Feng -- Yang, Jian -- Xie, Gang -- Keystone, Ed -- Westra, Harm-Jan -- Esko, Tonu -- Metspalu, Andres -- Zhou, Xuezhong -- Gupta, Namrata -- Mirel, Daniel -- Stahl, Eli A -- Diogo, Dorothee -- Cui, Jing -- Liao, Katherine -- Guo, Michael H -- Myouzen, Keiko -- Kawaguchi, Takahisa -- Coenen, Marieke J H -- van Riel, Piet L C M -- van de Laar, Mart A F J -- Guchelaar, Henk-Jan -- Huizinga, Tom W J -- Dieude, Philippe -- Mariette, Xavier -- Bridges, S Louis Jr -- Zhernakova, Alexandra -- Toes, Rene E M -- Tak, Paul P -- Miceli-Richard, Corinne -- Bang, So-Young -- Lee, Hye-Soon -- Martin, Javier -- Gonzalez-Gay, Miguel A -- Rodriguez-Rodriguez, Luis -- Rantapaa-Dahlqvist, Solbritt -- Arlestig, Lisbeth -- Choi, Hyon K -- Kamatani, Yoichiro -- Galan, Pilar -- Lathrop, Mark -- RACI consortium -- GARNET consortium -- Eyre, Steve -- Bowes, John -- Barton, Anne -- de Vries, Niek -- Moreland, Larry W -- Criswell, Lindsey A -- Karlson, Elizabeth W -- Taniguchi, Atsuo -- Yamada, Ryo -- Kubo, Michiaki -- Liu, Jun S -- Bae, Sang-Cheol -- Worthington, Jane -- Padyukov, Leonid -- Klareskog, Lars -- Gregersen, Peter K -- Raychaudhuri, Soumya -- Stranger, Barbara E -- De Jager, Philip L -- Franke, Lude -- Visscher, Peter M -- Brown, Matthew A -- Yamanaka, Hisashi -- Mimori, Tsuneyo -- Takahashi, Atsushi -- Xu, Huji -- Behrens, Timothy W -- Siminovitch, Katherine A -- Momohara, Shigeki -- Matsuda, Fumihiko -- Yamamoto, Kazuhiko -- Plenge, Robert M -- 20385/Arthritis Research UK/United Kingdom -- 79321/Canadian Institutes of Health Research/Canada -- K08-KAR055688A/PHS HHS/ -- K24 AR052403/AR/NIAMS NIH HHS/ -- P60 AR047785/AR/NIAMS NIH HHS/ -- R01 AR056768/AR/NIAMS NIH HHS/ -- R01 AR057108/AR/NIAMS NIH HHS/ -- R01 AR059648/AR/NIAMS NIH HHS/ -- R01 AR063759/AR/NIAMS NIH HHS/ -- R01-AR056291/AR/NIAMS NIH HHS/ -- R01-AR056768/AR/NIAMS NIH HHS/ -- R01-AR057108/AR/NIAMS NIH HHS/ -- R01-AR059648/AR/NIAMS NIH HHS/ -- R01-AR065944/AR/NIAMS NIH HHS/ -- R01AR063759-01A1/AR/NIAMS NIH HHS/ -- R21 AR056042/AR/NIAMS NIH HHS/ -- T15 LM007450/LM/NLM NIH HHS/ -- U01 GM092691/GM/NIGMS NIH HHS/ -- U01-GM092691/GM/NIGMS NIH HHS/ -- U19 HL065962/HL/NHLBI NIH HHS/ -- England -- Nature. 2014 Feb 20;506(7488):376-81. doi: 10.1038/nature12873. Epub 2013 Dec 25.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉1] Division of Rheumatology, Immunology, and Allergy, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. [2] Division of Genetics, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. [3] Program in Medical and Population Genetics, Broad Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA. ; 1] Division of Rheumatology, Immunology, and Allergy, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. [2] Division of Genetics, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. [3] Program in Medical and Population Genetics, Broad Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA. [4] Department of Statistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. [5] Centre for Cancer Research, Monash Institute of Medical Research, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia. ; 1] Division of Genetics, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. [2] Program in Medical and Population Genetics, Broad Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA. [3] Program in Translational NeuroPsychiatric Genomics, Institute for the Neurosciences, Department of Neurology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. ; 1] Center for Genomic Medicine, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto 606-8507, Japan. [2] Department of Rheumatology and Clinical immunology, Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8507, Japan. ; Institute of Rheumatology, Tokyo Women's Medical University, Tokyo 162-0054, Japan. ; Laboratory for Autoimmune Diseases, Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, RIKEN, Yokohama 230-0045, Japan. ; Department of Rheumatology and Clinical immunology, Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8507, Japan. ; Immunology Biomarkers Group, Genentech, South San Francisco, California 94080, USA. ; 1] Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee 37232, USA. [2] Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee 37232, USA. ; Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee 37232, USA. ; Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee 37232, USA. ; New York University Hospital for Joint Diseases, New York, New York 10003, USA. ; Department of Medicine, Albany Medical Center and The Center for Rheumatology, Albany, New York 12206, USA. ; Division of Rheumatology, Department of Medicine, New York, Presbyterian Hospital, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York, New York 10032, USA. ; Department of Rheumatology and Immunology, Shanghai Changzheng Hospital, Second Military Medical University, Shanghai 200003, China. ; Department of Pharmacology, Second Military Medical University, Shanghai 200433, China. ; 1] University of Queensland Diamantina Institute, Translational Research Institute, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia. [2] Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia. ; 1] Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Ontario M5G 1X5, Canada. [2] Toronto General Research Institute, Toronto, Ontario M5G 2M9, Canada. [3] Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2J7, Canada. ; Department of Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital and University of Toronto, Toronto M5S 2J7, Canada. ; Department of Genetics, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Hanzeplein 1, Groningen 9700 RB, the Netherlands. ; 1] Program in Medical and Population Genetics, Broad Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA. [2] Estonian Genome Center, University of Tartu, Riia 23b, Tartu 51010, Estonia. [3] Division of Endocrinology, Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. ; Estonian Genome Center, University of Tartu, Riia 23b, Tartu 51010, Estonia. ; School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China. ; Program in Medical and Population Genetics, Broad Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA. ; The Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York 10029, USA. ; 1] Division of Rheumatology, Immunology, and Allergy, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. [2] Program in Medical and Population Genetics, Broad Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA. [3] Division of Endocrinology, Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. ; Center for Genomic Medicine, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto 606-8507, Japan. ; Department of Human Genetics, Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen 6500 HB, the Netherlands. ; Department of Rheumatology, Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen 6500 HB, the Netherlands. ; Department of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology, Arthritis Center Twente, University Twente & Medisch Spectrum Twente, Enschede 7500 AE, the Netherlands. ; Department of Clinical Pharmacy and Toxicology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden 2300 RC, the Netherlands. ; Department of Rheumatology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden 2300 RC, the Netherlands. ; 1] Service de Rhumatologie et INSERM U699 Hopital Bichat Claude Bernard, Assistance Publique des Hopitaux de Paris, Paris 75018, France. [2] Universite Paris 7-Diderot, Paris 75013, France. ; Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale (INSERM) U1012, Universite Paris-Sud, Rhumatologie, Hopitaux Universitaires Paris-Sud, Assistance Publique-Hopitaux de Paris (AP-HP), Le Kremlin Bicetre 94275, France. ; Division of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology, Department of Medicine, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama 35294, USA. ; 1] Department of Genetics, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Hanzeplein 1, Groningen 9700 RB, the Netherlands. [2] Department of Rheumatology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden 2300 RC, the Netherlands. ; 1] AMC/University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1105 AZ, the Netherlands. [2] GlaxoSmithKline, Stevenage SG1 2NY, UK. [3] University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1TN, UK. ; Department of Rheumatology, Hanyang University Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases, Seoul 133-792, South Korea. ; Instituto de Parasitologia y Biomedicina Lopez-Neyra, CSIC, Granada 18100, Spain. ; Department of Rheumatology, Hospital Marques de Valdecilla, IFIMAV, Santander 39008, Spain. ; Hospital Clinico San Carlos, Madrid 28040, Spain. ; 1] Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine, Umea University, Umea SE-901 87, Sweden. [2] Department of Rheumatology, Umea University, Umea SE-901 87, Sweden. ; 1] Channing Laboratory, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston 02115, Massachusetts, USA. [2] Section of Rheumatology, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts 02118, USA. [3] Clinical Epidemiology Research and Training Unit, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts 02118, USA. ; Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humain (CEPH), Paris 75010, France. ; Universite Paris 13 Sorbonne Paris Cite, UREN (Nutritional Epidemiology Research Unit), Inserm (U557), Inra (U1125), Cnam, Bobigny 93017, France. ; McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre, Montreal, Quebec H3A 0G1 Canada. ; 1] Arthritis Research UK Epidemiology Unit, Centre for Musculoskeletal Research, University of Manchester, Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, Manchester M13 9NT, UK. [2] National Institute for Health Research, Manchester Musculoskeletal Biomedical Research Unit, Central Manchester University Hospitals National Health Service Foundation Trust, Manchester Academic Health Sciences Centre, Manchester M13 9NT, UK. ; Arthritis Research UK Epidemiology Unit, Centre for Musculoskeletal Research, University of Manchester, Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, Manchester M13 9NT, UK. ; Department of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology & Department of Genome Analysis, Academic Medical Center/University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1105 AZ, the Netherlands. ; Division of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15261, USA. ; Rosalind Russell Medical Research Center for Arthritis, Division of Rheumatology, Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94117, USA. ; Division of Rheumatology, Immunology, and Allergy, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. ; Unit of Statistical Genetics, Center for Genomic Medicine Graduate School of Medicine Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8507, Japan. ; Laboratory for Genotyping Development, Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, RIKEN, Yokohama 230-0045, Japan. ; Department of Statistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. ; Rheumatology Unit, Department of Medicine (Solna), Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm SE-171 76, Sweden. ; The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, Manhasset, New York 11030, USA. ; 1] Division of Rheumatology, Immunology, and Allergy, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. [2] Division of Genetics, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. [3] Program in Medical and Population Genetics, Broad Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA. [4] NIHR Manchester Musculoskeletal Biomedical, Research Unit, Central Manchester NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester Academic Health Sciences Centre, Manchester M13 9NT, UK. ; 1] Section of Genetic Medicine, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA. [2] Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA. ; University of Queensland Diamantina Institute, Translational Research Institute, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia. ; Laboratory for Statistical Analysis, Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, RIKEN, Yokohama 230-0045, Japan. ; 1] Center for Genomic Medicine, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto 606-8507, Japan. [2] Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) program, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Kawaguchi, Saitama 332-0012, Japan. [3] Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale (INSERM) Unite U852, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto 606-8507, Japan. ; 1] Laboratory for Autoimmune Diseases, Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, RIKEN, Yokohama 230-0045, Japan. [2] Department of Allergy and Rheumatology, Graduate School of Medicine, the University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24390342" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉

Description: Hundreds of genomic loci have been associated with a significant number of immune-mediated diseases, and a large proportion of these associated loci are shared among traits. Both the molecular mechanisms by which these loci confer disease susceptibility and the extent to which shared loci are implicated in a common pathogenesis are unknown. We therefore sought to dissect the functional components at loci shared between two autoimmune diseases: coeliac disease (CeD) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA). We used a cohort of 12 381 CeD cases and 7827 controls, and another cohort of 13 819 RA cases and 12 897 controls, all genotyped with the Immunochip platform. In the joint analysis, we replicated 19 previously identified loci shared by CeD and RA and discovered five new non-HLA loci shared by CeD and RA. Our fine-mapping results indicate that in nine of 24 shared loci the associated variants are distinct in the two diseases. Using cell-type-specific histone markers, we observed that loci which pointed to the same variants in both diseases were enriched for marks of promoters active in CD14+ and CD34+ immune cells ( P 〈 0.001), while loci pointing to distinct variants in one of the two diseases showed enrichment for marks of more specialized cell types, like CD4+ regulatory T cells in CeD ( P 〈 0.0001) compared with Th17 and CD15+ in RA ( P = 0.0029).

Description: Recent historical periods in Europe have been characterized by severe epidemic events such as plague, smallpox, or influenza that shaped the immune system of modern populations. This study aims to identify signals of convergent evolution of the immune system, based on the peculiar demographic history in which two populations with...

Description: Using the Immunochip for genotyping, we identified 39 non-human leukocyte antigen (non-HLA) loci associated to celiac disease (CeD), an immune-mediated disease with a worldwide frequency of ~1%. The most significant non-HLA signal mapped to the intronic region of 70 kb in the LPP gene. Our aim was to fine map and identify possible functional variants in the LPP locus. We performed a meta-analysis in a cohort of 25 169 individuals from six different populations previously genotyped using Immunochip. Imputation using data from the Genome of the Netherlands and 1000 Genomes projects, followed by meta-analysis, confirmed the strong association signal on the LPP locus (rs2030519, P = 1.79 x 10 –49 ), without any novel associations. The conditional analysis on this top SNP-indicated association to a single common haplotype. By performing haplotype analyses in each population separately, as well as in a combined group of the four populations that reach the significant threshold after correction ( P 〈 0.008), we narrowed down the CeD-associated region from 70 to 2.8 kb ( P = 1.35 x 10 –44 ). By intersecting regulatory data from the ENCODE project, we found a functional SNP, rs4686484 ( P = 3.12 x 10 –49 ), that maps to several B-cell enhancer elements and a highly conserved region. This SNP was also predicted to change the binding motif of the transcription factors IRF4, IRF11, Nkx2.7 and Nkx2.9, suggesting its role in transcriptional regulation. We later found significantly low levels of LPP mRNA in CeD biopsies compared with controls, thus our results suggest that rs4686484 is the functional variant in this locus, while LPP expression is decreased in CeD.

Description: In recent years, functional genomics approaches combining genetic information with bulk RNA-sequencing data have identified the downstream expression effects of disease-associated genetic risk factors through so-called expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) analysis. Single-cell RNA-sequencing creates enormous opportunities for mapping eQTLs across different cell types and in dynamic processes, many of which are obscured when using bulk methods. Rapid increase in throughput and reduction in cost per cell now allow this technology to be applied to large-scale population genetics studies. To fully leverage these emerging data resources, we have founded the single-cell eQTLGen consortium (sc-eQTLGen), aimed at pinpointing the cellular contexts in which disease-causing genetic variants affect gene expression. Here, we outline the goals, approach and potential utility of the sc-eQTLGen consortium. We also provide a set of study design considerations for future single-cell eQTL studies.