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Inferring causal cell types of human diseases and risk variants from candidate regulatory elements [preprint]

Kim, Artem
Zhang, Zixuan
Legros, Come
Lu, Zeyun
de Smith, Adam
Moore, Jill E
Mancuso, Nicholas
Gazal, Steven
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Authors
Kim, Artem
Zhang, Zixuan
Legros, Come
Lu, Zeyun
de Smith, Adam
Moore, Jill E
Mancuso, Nicholas
Gazal, Steven
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Preprint
Publication Date
2024-05-18
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Abstract

The heritability of human diseases is extremely enriched in candidate regulatory elements (cRE) from disease-relevant cell types. Critical next steps are to infer which and how many cell types are truly causal for a disease (after accounting for co-regulation across cell types), and to understand how individual variants impact disease risk through single or multiple causal cell types. Here, we propose CT-FM and CT-FM-SNP, two methods that leverage cell-type-specific cREs to fine-map causal cell types for a trait and for its candidate causal variants, respectively. We applied CT-FM to 63 GWAS summary statistics (average N = 417K) using nearly one thousand cRE annotations, primarily coming from ENCODE4. CT-FM inferred 81 causal cell types with corresponding SNP-annotations explaining a high fraction of trait SNP-heritability (~2/3 of the SNP-heritability explained by existing cREs), identified 16 traits with multiple causal cell types, highlighted cell-disease relationships consistent with known biology, and uncovered previously unexplored cellular mechanisms in psychiatric and immune-related diseases. Finally, we applied CT-FM-SNP to 39 UK Biobank traits and predicted high confidence causal cell types for 2,798 candidate causal non-coding SNPs. Our results suggest that most SNPs impact a phenotype through a single cell type, and that pleiotropic SNPs target different cell types depending on the phenotype context. Altogether, CT-FM and CT-FM-SNP shed light on how genetic variants act collectively and individually at the cellular level to impact disease risk.

Source

Kim A, Zhang Z, Legros C, Lu Z, de Smith A, Moore JE, Mancuso N, Gazal S. Inferring causal cell types of human diseases and risk variants from candidate regulatory elements. medRxiv [Preprint]. 2024 May 18:2024.05.17.24307556. doi: 10.1101/2024.05.17.24307556. PMID: 38798383; PMCID: PMC11118635.

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DOI
10.1101/2024.05.17.24307556
PubMed ID
38798383
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This article is a preprint. Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International