0000000000622206

AUTHOR

A Compston

Genetic burden in multiple sclerosis families

A previous study using cumulative genetic risk estimations in multiple sclerosis (MS) successfully tracked the aggregation of susceptibility variants in multi-case and single-case families. It used a limited description of susceptibility loci available at the time (17 loci). Even though the full roster of MS risk genes remains unavailable, we estimated the genetic burden in MS families and assess its disease predictive power using up to 64 single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers according to the most recent literature. A total of 708 controls, 3251 MS patients and their relatives, as well as 117 twin pairs were genotyped. We validated the increased aggregation of genetic burden in mult…

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Linkage disequilibrium screening for multiple sclerosis implicates JAG1 and POU2AF1 as susceptibility genes in Europeans.

By combining all the data available from the Genetic Analysis of Multiple sclerosis in EuropeanS (GAMES) project, we have been able to identify 17 microsatellite markers showing consistent evidence for apparent association. As might be expected five of these markers map within the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) and are in LD with HLA-DRB1. Individual genotyping of the 12 non-MHC markers confirmed association for three of them — D11S1986, D19S552 and D20S894. Association mapping across the candidate genes implicated by these markers in 937 UK trio families revealed modestly associated haplotypes in JAG1 (p=0.019) on chromosome 20p12.2 and POU2AF1 (p=0.003) on chromosome 11q23.1.

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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 -…

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Class II HLA interactions modulate genetic risk for multiple sclerosis

Association studies have greatly refined the understanding of how variation within the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes influences risk of multiple sclerosis. However, the extent to which major effects are modulated by interactions is poorly characterized. We analyzed high-density SNP data on 17,465 cases and 30,385 controls from 11 cohorts of European ancestry, in combination with imputation of classical HLA alleles, to build a high-resolution map of HLA genetic risk and assess the evidence for interactions involving classical HLA alleles. Among new and previously identified class II risk alleles (HLA-DRB1*15:01, HLA-DRB1*13:03, HLA-DRB1*03:01, HLA-DRB1*08:01 and HLA-DQB1*03:02) and cla…

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