Abstract :
[en] GWAS have identified >200 risk loci for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). The majority of disease associations are known to be driven by regulatory variants. To identify the putative causative genes that are perturbed by these variants, we generate a large transcriptome dataset (9 disease-relevant cell types) and identify 23,650 cis-eQTL. We show that these are determined by ∼9,720 regulatory modules, of which ∼3,000 operate in multiple tissues and ∼970 on multiple genes. We identify regulatory modules that are driveing the disease association for 63 of the 200 risk loci, and show that these are enriched in multigenic modules. We resequence 45 of the corresponding 100 candidate genes in 6,600 Crohn disease (CD) cases and 5,500 controls and show that they are significantly enriched in causative genes. Our analyses indicate that ≥10-fold larger sample sizes will be required to demonstrate the causality of individual genes using standard burden tests.
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