Large-scale genome-wide association study in a Japanese population identifies novel susceptibility loci across different diseases

Abstract

The overwhelming majority of participants in current genetic studies are of European ancestry1–3, limiting our genetic understanding of complex disease in non-European populations. To address this, we aimed to elucidate polygenic disease biology in the East Asian population by conducting a genome-wide association study (GWAS) with 212,453 Japanese individuals across 42 diseases. We detected 320 independent signals in 276 loci for 27 diseases, among which 25 loci were novel (P < 9.58 x 10-9, an empirically estimated significance threshold). East Asian-specific missense variants were identified as candidate causal variants for three novel loci, and we successfully replicated two of them by analyzing independent Japanese cohorts; p.R220W of ATG16L2 associated with coronary artery disease and p.V326A of POT1 associated with lung cancer. We further investigated enrichment of heritability within 2,868 annotations of genome-wide transcription factor occupancy, and identified 378 significant enrichments across nine diseases (FDR < 0.05) (e.g. NF-κB for immune-related diseases). This large-scale GWAS in a Japanese population provides insights into the etiology of common complex diseases and highlights the importance of performing GWAS in non-European populations.