Abstract
Prediction of disease risk is an essential part of preventative medicine, often guiding clinical management. Risk prediction typically includes risk factors such as age, sex, family history ...of disease and lifestyle (e.g. smoking status); however, in recent years, there has been increasing interest to include genomic information into risk models. Polygenic risk scores (PRS) aggregate the effects of many genetic variants across the human genome into a single score and have recently been shown to have predictive value for multiple common diseases. In this review, we summarize the potential use cases for seven common diseases (breast cancer, prostate cancer, coronary artery disease, obesity, type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease) where PRS has or could have clinical utility. PRS analysis for these diseases frequently revolved around (i) risk prediction performance of a PRS alone and in combination with other non-genetic risk factors, (ii) estimation of lifetime risk trajectories, (iii) the independent information of PRS and family history of disease or monogenic mutations and (iv) estimation of the value of adding a PRS to specific clinical risk prediction scenarios. We summarize open questions regarding PRS usability, ancestry bias and transferability, emphasizing the need for the next wave of studies to focus on the implementation and health-economic value of PRS testing. In conclusion, it is becoming clear that PRS have value in disease risk prediction and there are multiple areas where this may have clinical utility.
The NHGRI-EBI GWAS Catalog (www.ebi.ac.uk/gwas) is a FAIR knowledgebase providing detailed, structured, standardised and interoperable genome-wide association study (GWAS) data to >200 000 users per ...year from academic research, healthcare and industry. The Catalog contains variant-trait associations and supporting metadata for >45 000 published GWAS across >5000 human traits, and >40 000 full P-value summary statistics datasets. Content is curated from publications or acquired via author submission of prepublication summary statistics through a new submission portal and validation tool. GWAS data volume has vastly increased in recent years. We have updated our software to meet this scaling challenge and to enable rapid release of submitted summary statistics. The scope of the repository has expanded to include additional data types of high interest to the community, including sequencing-based GWAS, gene-based analyses and copy number variation analyses. Community outreach has increased the number of shared datasets from under-represented traits, e.g. cancer, and we continue to contribute to awareness of the lack of population diversity in GWAS. Interoperability of the Catalog has been enhanced through links to other resources including the Polygenic Score Catalog and the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium, refinements to GWAS trait annotation, and the development of a standard format for GWAS data.
The Human Transcription Factors Lambert, Samuel A.; Jolma, Arttu; Campitelli, Laura F. ...
Cell,
02/2018, Letnik:
172, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Transcription factors (TFs) recognize specific DNA sequences to control chromatin and transcription, forming a complex system that guides expression of the genome. Despite keen interest in ...understanding how TFs control gene expression, it remains challenging to determine how the precise genomic binding sites of TFs are specified and how TF binding ultimately relates to regulation of transcription. This review considers how TFs are identified and functionally characterized, principally through the lens of a catalog of over 1,600 likely human TFs and binding motifs for two-thirds of them. Major classes of human TFs differ markedly in their evolutionary trajectories and expression patterns, underscoring distinct functions. TFs likewise underlie many different aspects of human physiology, disease, and variation, highlighting the importance of continued effort to understand TF-mediated gene regulation.
Knowing how and where transcription factors bind to the genome is crucial for understanding how they control gene expression. This Review looks at how human TFs are identified and the ways they interact with DNA sequences.
Metabolic biomarker data quantified by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy in approximately 121,000 UK Biobank participants has recently been released as a community resource, comprising ...absolute concentrations and ratios of 249 circulating metabolites, lipids, and lipoprotein sub-fractions. Here we identify and characterise additional sources of unwanted technical variation influencing individual biomarkers in the data available to download from UK Biobank. These included sample preparation time, shipping plate well, spectrometer batch effects, drift over time within spectrometer, and outlier shipping plates. We developed a procedure for removing this unwanted technical variation, and demonstrate that it increases signal for genetic and epidemiological studies of the NMR metabolic biomarker data in UK Biobank. We subsequently developed an R package, ukbnmr, which we make available to the wider research community to enhance the utility of the UK Biobank NMR metabolic biomarker data and to facilitate rapid analysis.
Individuals with South Asian ancestry have a higher risk of heart disease than other groups but have been largely excluded from genetic research. Using data from 22,000 British Pakistani and ...Bangladeshi individuals with linked electronic health records from the Genes & Health cohort, we conducted genome-wide association studies of coronary artery disease and its key risk factors. Using power-adjusted transferability ratios, we found evidence for transferability for the majority of cardiometabolic loci powered to replicate. The performance of polygenic scores was high for lipids and blood pressure, but lower for BMI and coronary artery disease. Adding a polygenic score for coronary artery disease to clinical risk factors showed significant improvement in reclassification. In Mendelian randomisation using transferable loci as instruments, our findings were consistent with results in European-ancestry individuals. Taken together, trait-specific transferability of trait loci between populations is an important consideration with implications for risk prediction and causal inference.
Transcription factor (TF) DNA sequence preferences direct their regulatory activity, but are currently known for only ∼1% of eukaryotic TFs. Broadly sampling DNA-binding domain (DBD) types from ...multiple eukaryotic clades, we determined DNA sequence preferences for >1,000 TFs encompassing 54 different DBD classes from 131 diverse eukaryotes. We find that closely related DBDs almost always have very similar DNA sequence preferences, enabling inference of motifs for ∼34% of the ∼170,000 known or predicted eukaryotic TFs. Sequences matching both measured and inferred motifs are enriched in chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing (ChIP-seq) peaks and upstream of transcription start sites in diverse eukaryotic lineages. SNPs defining expression quantitative trait loci in Arabidopsis promoters are also enriched for predicted TF binding sites. Importantly, our motif "library" can be used to identify specific TFs whose binding may be altered by human disease risk alleles. These data present a powerful resource for mapping transcriptional networks across eukaryotes.
Polygenic scores (PGS) can be used for risk stratification by quantifying individuals' genetic predisposition to disease, and many potentially clinically useful applications have been proposed. Here, ...we review the latest potential benefits of PGS in the clinic and challenges to implementation. PGS could augment risk stratification through combined use with traditional risk factors (demographics, disease-specific risk factors, family history, etc.), to support diagnostic pathways, to predict groups with therapeutic benefits, and to increase the efficiency of clinical trials. However, there exist challenges to maximizing the clinical utility of PGS, including FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) use and standardized sharing of the genomic data needed to develop and recalculate PGS, the equitable performance of PGS across populations and ancestries, the generation of robust and reproducible PGS calculations, and the responsible communication and interpretation of results. We outline how these challenges may be overcome analytically and with more diverse data as well as highlight sustained community efforts to achieve equitable, impactful, and responsible use of PGS in healthcare.
Understanding how genetic variants influence disease risk and complex traits (variant-to-function) is one of the major challenges in human genetics. Here we present a model-driven framework to ...leverage human genome-scale metabolic networks to define how genetic variants affect biochemical reaction fluxes across major human tissues, including skeletal muscle, adipose, liver, brain and heart. As proof of concept, we build personalised organ-specific metabolic flux models for 524,615 individuals of the INTERVAL and UK Biobank cohorts and perform a fluxome-wide association study (FWAS) to identify 4312 associations between personalised flux values and the concentration of metabolites in blood. Furthermore, we apply FWAS to identify 92 metabolic fluxes associated with the risk of developing coronary artery disease, many of which are linked to processes previously described to play in role in the disease. Our work demonstrates that genetically personalised metabolic models can elucidate the downstream effects of genetic variants on biochemical reactions involved in common human diseases.
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