Dense genotyping of immune-related disease regions identifies nine new risk loci for primary sclerosing cholangitis
To access publisher's full text version of this article click on the hyperlink at the bottom of the page Primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) is a severe liver disease of unknown etiology leading to fibrotic destruction of the bile ducts and ultimately to the need for liver transplantation. We compared 3,789 PSC cases of European ancestry to 25,079 population controls across 130,422 SNPs genotyped using the Immunochip. We identified 12 genome-wide significant associations outside the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) complex, 9 of which were new, increasing the number of known PSC risk loci to 16. Despite comorbidity with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in 72% of the cases, 6 of the 12 loci sh…
Low frequency and rare coding variation contributes to multiple sclerosis risk
AbstractMultiple sclerosis is a common, complex neurological disease, where almost 20% of risk heritability can be attributed to common genetic variants, including >230 identified by genome-wide association studies (Patsopoulos et al., 2017). Multiple strands of evidence suggest that the majority of the remaining heritability is also due to the additive effects of individual variants, rather than epistatic interactions between these variants, or mutations exclusive to individual families. Here, we show in 68,379 cases and controls that as much as 5% of this heritability is explained by low-frequency variation in gene coding sequence. We identify four novel genes driving MS risk independe…
The Multiple Sclerosis Genomic Map: Role of peripheral immune cells and resident microglia in susceptibility
Abstract:We assembled and analyzed genetic data of 47,351 multiple sclerosis (MS) subjects and 68,284 control subjects and establish a reference map of the genetic architecture of MS that includes 200 autosomal susceptibility variants outside the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), one chromosome X variant, and 32 independent associations within the extended MHC. We used an ensemble of methods to prioritize up to 551 potentially associated MS susceptibility genes, that implicate multiple innate and adaptive pathways distributed across the cellular components of the immune system. Using expression profiles from purified human microglia, we do find enrichment for MS genes in these brain -…