| 1. |
- Aguet, Francois, et al.
(författare)
-
Molecular quantitative trait loci
- 2023
-
Ingår i: NATURE REVIEWS METHODS PRIMERS. - : Springer Nature. - 2662-8449. ; 3:1
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Understanding functional effects of genetic variants is one of the key challenges in human genetics, as much of disease-associated variation is located in non-coding regions with typically unknown putative gene regulatory effects. One of the most important approaches in this field has been molecular quantitative trait locus (molQTL) mapping, where genetic variation is associated with molecular traits that can be measured at scale, such as gene expression, splicing and chromatin accessibility. The maturity of the field and large-scale studies have produced a rich set of established methods for molQTL analysis, with novel technologies opening up new areas of discovery. In this Primer, we discuss the study design, input data and statistical methods for molQTL mapping and outline the properties of the resulting data as well as popular downstream applications. We review both the limitations and caveats of molQTL mapping as well as future potential approaches to tackle them. With technological development now providing many complementary methods for functional characterization of genetic variants, we anticipate that molQTLs will remain an important part of this toolkit as the only existing approach that can measure human variation in its native genomic, cellular and tissue context.
|
|
| 2. |
- Dai, Qile, et al.
(författare)
-
OTTERS: a powerful TWAS framework leveraging summary-level reference data
- 2023
-
Ingår i: Nature Communications. - : Springer Nature. - 2041-1723. ; 14:1
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Most existing TWAS tools require individual-level eQTL reference data and thus are not applicable to summary-level reference eQTL datasets. The development of TWAS methods that can harness summary-level reference data is valuable to enable TWAS in broader settings and enhance power due to increased reference sample size. Thus, we develop a TWAS framework called OTTERS (Omnibus Transcriptome Test using Expression Reference Summary data) that adapts multiple polygenic risk score (PRS) methods to estimate eQTL weights from summary-level eQTL reference data and conducts an omnibus TWAS. We show that OTTERS is a practical and powerful TWAS tool by both simulations and application studies.
|
|
| 3. |
- Fresard, Laure, et al.
(författare)
-
Identification of rare-disease genes using blood transcriptome sequencing and large control cohorts
- 2019
-
Ingår i: Nature Medicine. - : NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP. - 1078-8956 .- 1546-170X. ; 25:6, s. 911-919
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- It is estimated that 350 million individuals worldwide suffer from rare diseases, which are predominantly caused by mutation in a single gene(1). The current molecular diagnostic rate is estimated at 50%, with whole-exome sequencing (WES) among the most successful approaches(2-5). For patients in whom WES is uninformative, RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) has shown diagnostic utility in specific tissues and diseases(6-8). This includes muscle biopsies from patients with undiagnosed rare muscle disorders(6,9), and cultured fibroblasts from patients with mitochondrial disorders(7). However, for many individuals, biopsies are not performed for clinical care, and tissues are difficult to access. We sought to assess the utility of RNA-seq from blood as a diagnostic tool for rare diseases of different pathophysiologies. We generated whole-blood RNA-seq from 94 individuals with undiagnosed rare diseases spanning 16 diverse disease categories. We developed a robust approach to compare data from these individuals with large sets of RNA-seq data for controls (n = 1,594 unrelated controls and n = 49 family members) and demonstrated the impacts of expression, splicing, gene and variant filtering strategies on disease gene identification. Across our cohort, we observed that RNA-seq yields a 7.5% diagnostic rate, and an additional 16.7% with improved candidate gene resolution.
|
|
| 4. |
- Gill, Dipender, et al.
(författare)
-
ACE inhibition and cardiometabolic risk factors, lung ACE2 and TMPRSS2 gene expression, and plasma ACE2 levels : a Mendelian randomization study
- 2020
-
Ingår i: Royal Society Open Science. - : ROYAL SOC. - 2054-5703. ; 7:11
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) and serine protease TMPRSS2 have been implicated in cell entry for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus responsible for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The expression of ACE2 and TMPRSS2 in the lung epithelium might have implications for the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and severity of COVID-19. We use human genetic variants that proxy angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor drug effects and cardiovascular risk factors to investigate whether these exposures affect lung ACE2 and TMPRSS2 gene expression and circulating ACE2 levels. We observed no consistent evidence of an association of genetically predicted serum ACE levels with any of our outcomes. There was weak evidence for an association of genetically predicted serum ACE levels with ACE2 gene expression in the Lung eQTL Consortium (p = 0.014), but this finding did not replicate. There was evidence of a positive association of genetic liability to type 2 diabetes mellitus with lung ACE2 gene expression in the Gene-Tissue Expression (GTEx) study (p = 4 x 10(-4)) and with circulating plasma ACE2 levels in the INTERVAL study (p = 0.03), but not with lung ACE2 expression in the Lung eQTL Consortium study (p = 0.68). There were no associations of genetically proxied liability to the other cardiometabolic traits with any outcome. This study does not provide consistent evidence to support an effect of serum ACE levels (as a proxy for ACE inhibitors) or cardiometabolic risk factors on lung ACE2 and TMPRSS2 expression or plasma ACE2 levels.
|
|
