Genetic Drivers of Epigenetic and Transcriptional Variation in Human Immune Cells

Chen L, Ge B, Casale FP, Vasquez L, Kwan T, Garrido-Martín D, Watt S, Yan Y, Kundu K, Ecker S, Datta A, Richardson D, Burden F, Mead D, Mann AL, Fernandez JM, Rowlston S, Wilder SP, Farrow S, Shao X, Lambourne JJ, Redensek A, Albers CA, Amstislavskiy V, Ashford S, Berentsen K, Bomba L, Bourque G, Bujold D, Busche S, Caron M, Chen SH, Cheung W, Delaneau O, Dermitzakis ET, Elding H, Colgiu I, Bagger FO, Flicek P, Habibi E, Iotchkova V, Janssen-Megens E, Kim B, Lehrach H, Lowy E, Mandoli A, Matarese F, Maurano MT, Morris JA, Pancaldi V, Pourfarzad F, Rehnstrom K, Rendon A, Risch T, Sharifi N, Simon MM, Sultan M, Valencia A, Walter K, Wang SY, Frontini M, Antonarakis SE, Clarke L, Yaspo ML, Beck S, Guigo R, Rico D, Martens JHA, Ouwehand WH, Kuijpers TW, Paul DS, Stunnenberg HG, Stegle O, Downes K, Pastinen T, Soranzo N.
Cell. 2016-11-17;167(5):1398-1414.
Abstract
Characterizing the multifaceted contribution of genetic and epigenetic factors to disease phenotypes is a major challenge in human genetics and medicine. We carried out high-resolution genetic, epigenetic, and transcriptomic profiling in three major human immune cell types (CD14+ monocytes, CD16+ neutrophils, and naive CD4+ T cells) from up to 197 individuals. We assess, quantitatively, the relative contribution of cis-genetic and epigenetic factors to transcription and evaluate their impact as potential sources of confounding in epigenome-wide association studies. Further, we characterize highly coordinated genetic effects on gene expression, methylation, and histone variation through quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping and allele-specific (AS) analyses. Finally, we demonstrate colocalization of molecular trait QTLs at 345 unique immune disease loci. This expansive, high-resolution atlas of multi-omics changes yields insights into cell-type-specific correlation between diverse genomic inputs, more generalizable correlations between these inputs, and defines molecular events that may underpin complex disease risk.
Consortium data used in this publication
It's part of the BLUEPRINT epigenome project. The accession numbers for the alignment data reported in this paper are European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA): WGS: EGAD00001002663; RNA: EGAD00001002671/EGAD00001002674/EGAD00001002675; ChIP-seq: EGAD00001002670/EGAD00001002672/EGAD00001002673; and 450K DNA methylation: EGAS00001001456. The full QTL summary statistics from this study can be accessed from http://blueprint-dev.bioinfo.cnio.es/WP10/qtls. Quantification matrices, donor metadata, Chip-seq peaks and Chip seq coverage files are available via ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/blueprint/blueprint_Epivar/.