Cited 13 times since 2022 (7.5 per year) source: EuropePMC American journal of human genetics, Volume 109, Issue 8, 1 1 2022, Pages 1366-1387 A multi-layer functional genomic analysis to understand noncoding genetic variation in lipids. Ramdas S, Judd J, Graham SE, Kanoni S, Wang Y, Surakka I, Wenz B, Clarke SL, Chesi A, Wells A, Bhatti KF, Vedantam S, Winkler TW, Locke AE, Marouli E, Zajac GJM, Wu KH, Ntalla I, Hui Q, Klarin D, Hilliard AT, Wang Z, Xue C, Thorleifsson G, Helgadottir A, Gudbjartsson DF, Holm H, Olafsson I, Hwang MY, Han S, Akiyama M, Sakaue S, Terao C, Kanai M, Zhou W, Brumpton BM, Rasheed H, Havulinna AS, Veturi Y, Pacheco JA, Rosenthal EA, Lingren T, Feng Q, Kullo IJ, Narita A, Takayama J, Martin HC, Hunt KA, Trivedi B, Haessler J, Giulianini F, Bradford Y, Miller JE, Campbell A, Lin K, Millwood IY, Rasheed A, Hindy G, Faul JD, Zhao W, Weir DR, Turman C, Huang H, Graff M, Choudhury A, Sengupta D, Mahajan A, Brown MR, Zhang W, Yu K, Schmidt EM, Pandit A, Gustafsson S, Yin X, Luan J, Zhao JH, Matsuda F, Jang HM, Yoon K, Medina-Gomez C, Pitsillides A, Hottenga JJ, Wood AR, Ji Y, Gao Z, Haworth S, Mitchell RE, Chai JF, Aadahl M, Bjerregaard AA, Yao J, Manichaikul A, Lee WJ, Hsiung CA, Warren HR, Ramirez J, Bork-Jensen J, Kårhu
A major challenge of genome-wide association studies (GWASs) is to translate phenotypic associations into biological insights. Here, we integrate a large GWAS on blood lipids involving 1.6 million individuals from five ancestries with a wide array of functional genomic datasets to discover regulatory mechanisms underlying lipid associations. We first prioritize lipid-associated genes with expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) colocalizations and then add chromatin interaction data to narrow the search for functional genes. Polygenic enrichment analysis across 697 annotations from a host of tissues and cell types confirms the central role of the liver in lipid levels and highlights the selective enrichment of adipose-specific chromatin marks in high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides. Overlapping transcription factor (TF) binding sites with lipid-associated loci identifies TFs relevant in lipid biology. In addition, we present an integrative framework to prioritize causal variants at GWAS loci, producing a comprehensive list of candidate causal genes and variants with multiple layers of functional evidence. We highlight two of the prioritized genes, CREBRF and RRBP1, which show convergent evidence across functional datasets supporting their roles in lipid biology.
