Search results for "Genome-wide Association Study"

2014

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is the most common auto-inflammatory disease of the central nervous system, affecting more than 2 million individuals worldwide. It is a genetically complex disease, in which a substantial part of a person's liability to develop MS is caused by a combination of multiple genetic and non-genetic (e.g. environmental) risk factors. Increasing this complexity, many of the involved risk factors likely interact in an intricate and hitherto ill-defined fashion. Despite these complexities, and owing greatly to the advent and application of large-scale genome-wide association studies, our understanding of the genetic factors underlying MS etiology has begun to gain unprecedent…

Cis-epistasis at the LPA locus and risk of cardiovascular diseases.

2022

AIMS Coronary artery disease (CAD) has a strong genetic predisposition. However, despite substantial discoveries made by genome-wide association studies (GWAS), a large proportion of heritability awaits identification. Non-additive genetic-effects might be responsible for part of the unaccounted genetic variance. Here we attempted a proof-of-concept study to identify non-additive genetic effects, namely epistatic interactions, associated with CAD. METHODS AND RESULTS We tested for epistatic interactions in ten CAD case-control studies and UK Biobank with focus on 8,068 SNPs at 56 loci with known associations with CAD risk. We identified a SNP pair located in cis at the LPA locus, rs1800769 …

Genome-wide association meta-analysis of PR interval identifies 47 novel loci associated with atrial and atrioventricular electrical activity

2018

ABSTRACTElectrocardiographic PR interval measures atrial and atrioventricular depolarization and conduction, and abnormal PR interval is a risk factor for atrial fibrillation and heart block. We performed a genome-wide association study in over 92,000 individuals of European descent and identified 44 loci associated with PR interval (34 novel). Examination of the 44 loci revealed known and novel biological processes involved in cardiac atrial electrical activity, and genes in these loci were highly over-represented in several cardiac disease processes. Nearly half of the 61 independent index variants in the 44 loci were associated with atrial or blood transcript expression levels, or were i…

A genome-wide association study identifies Arabidopsis thaliana genes that contribute to differences in the outcome of infection with two Turnip mosa…

2021

Viruses lie in a continuum between generalism and specialism depending on their ability to infect more or less hosts. While generalists are able to successfully infect a wide variety of hosts, specialists are limited to one or a few. Even though generalists seem to gain an advantage due to their wide host range, they usually pay a pleiotropic fitness cost within each host. On the contrary, a specialist has maximal fitness within its own host. A relevant yet poorly explored question is whether viruses differ in the way they interact with their hosts’ gene expression depending on their degree of specialization. Using a genome-wide association study approach, we have identified host genes whos…

2014

Genetic factors underlie a substantial proportion of individual differences in cognitive functions in humans, including processes related to episodic and working memory. While genetic association studies have proposed several candidate "memory genes", these currently explain only a minor fraction of the phenotypic variance. Here, we performed genome-wide screening on 13 episodic and working memory phenotypes in 1,318 participants of the Berlin Aging Study II aged 60 years or older. The analyses highlight a number of novel single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with memory performance, including one located in a putative regulatory region of microRNA (miRNA) hsa-mir-138-5p (rs9882…

Arabidopsis thalianagenes contributing to differences in the outcome of infection with generalist and specialist strains ofTurnip mosaic virusidentif…

2020

AbstractPathogens can be classified as generalists or specialists depending on their host breadth. While generalists are able to successfully infect a wide variety of host species, the host range of specialists is limited to a few related species. Even though generalists seem to gain an advantage due to their wide host range, they usually pay a cost in terms of fitness within each host species (i.e., the jack-of-all trades, master of none). On the contrary, specialists have high fitness within their own host. A highly relevant yet poorly explored question is whether generalist and specialist viruses differ in the way they interact with their host’s gene expression networks. To identify host…

Successful Replication of GWAS Hits for Multiple Sclerosis in 10,000 Germans Using the Exome Array

2015

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) successfully identified various chromosomal regions to be associated with multiple sclerosis (MS). The primary aim of this study was to replicate reported associations from GWAS using an exome array in a large German study. German MS cases (n = 4,476) and German controls (n = 5,714) were genotyped using the Illumina HumanExome v1-Chip. Genotype calling was performed with the Illumina Genome Studio(TM) Genotyping Module, followed by zCall. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in seven regions outside the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) region showed genome-wide significant associations with MS (P values < 5 × 10(-8) ). These associations have been repor…

Class II HLA interactions modulate genetic risk for multiple sclerosis

2015

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…

Genome-wide association analysis on normal hearing function identifies PCDH20 and SLC28A3 as candidates for hearing function and loss.

2015

Hearing loss and individual differences in normal hearing both have a substantial genetic basis. Although many new genes contributing to deafness have been identified, very little is known about genes/variants modulating the normal range of hearing ability. To fill this gap, we performed a two-stage meta-analysis on hearing thresholds (tested at 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8 kHz) and on pure-tone averages (low-, medium-and high-frequency thresholds grouped) in several isolated populations from Italy and Central Asia (total N = 2636). Here, we detected two genome-wide significant loci close to PCDH20 and SLC28A3 (top hits: rs78043697, P = 4.71E-10 and rs7032430, P = 2.39E-09, respectively). For both…

Genome-wide association study for milk production traits in an economically important local dairy sheep breed

2021

In this study, we conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) for five milk production traits in the Valle del Belice sheep. Repeated measurements for milk yield (MY), fat percentage and yield (F% and FY) and protein percentage and yield (P% and PY) on 481 ewes, were available for the analysis. The animals were genotyped using the Illumina Ovine 50k BeadChip. Weighted deregressed breeding values (DEBVw) were used as phenotypes for GWAS analysis. A total of 23 genome-wide significant SNPs were identified: 3 associated with MY, 9 with FY, and 11 with P%. Several SNPs mapped within known candidate genes or previously reported QTL for milk production traits in livestock species. Additional…