(2014) Farh, Kyle Kai-How; Marson, Alexander; Zhu, Jiang; Kleinewietfeld, Markus; Housley, William J.; Beik, Samantha; Shoresh, Noam; Whitton, Holly; Ryan, Russell J.H.; Shishkin, Alexander A.; Hatan, Meital; Carrasco-Alfonso, Marlene J.; Mayer, Dita; Luckey, C. John; Patsopoulos, Nikolaos; De Jager, Philip; Kuchroo, Vijay; Epstein, Charles B; Daly, Mark; Hafler, David; Bernstein, Bradley
Summary Genome-wide association studies have identified loci underlying human diseases, but the causal nucleotide changes and mechanisms remain largely unknown. Here we developed a fine-mapping algorithm to identify candidate causal variants for 21 autoimmune diseases from genotyping data. We integrated these predictions with transcription and cis-regulatory element annotations, derived by mapping RNA and chromatin in primary immune cells, including resting and stimulated CD4+ T-cell subsets, regulatory T-cells, CD8+ T-cells, B-cells, and monocytes. We find that ~90% of causal variants are noncoding, with ~60% mapping to immune-cell enhancers, many of which gain histone acetylation and transcribe enhancer-associated RNA upon immune stimulation. Causal variants tend to occur near binding sites for master regulators of immune differentiation and stimulus-dependent gene activation, but only 10–20% directly alter recognizable transcription factor binding motifs. Rather, most noncoding risk variants, including those that alter gene expression, affect non-canonical sequence determinants not well-explained by current gene regulatory models.
