CREdb: A comprehensive database of Cis-Regulatory Elements and their activity in human cells and tissues.

Background: Cis-regulatory elements (CREs) play a pivotal role in gene expression regulation, allowing cells to serve diverse functions and respond to external stimuli. Understanding CREs is essential for personalized medicine and disease research, as an increasing number of genetic variants associated with phenotypes and diseases overlap with CREs. However, existing databases often focus on subsets of regulatory elements and present each identified instance of element individually, confounding the effort to obtain a comprehensive view.

Shared Molecular Neuropathology Across Major Psychiatric Disorders Parallels Polygenic Overlap.

(Gandal et al., "Shared molecular neuropathology across major psychiatric disorders parallels polygenic overlap" Science 09 Feb 2018:Vol. 359, Issue 6376, pp.

Inherited and De Novo Genetic Risk for Autism Impacts Shared Networks.

We performed a comprehensive assessment of rare inherited variation in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by analyzing whole-genome sequences of 2,308 individuals from families with multiple affected children. We implicate 69 genes in ASD risk, including 24 passing genome-wide Bonferroni correction and 16 new ASD risk genes, most supported by rare inherited variants, a substantial extension of previous findings. Biological pathways enriched for genes harboring inherited variants represent cytoskeletal organization and ion transport, which are distinct from pathways implicated in previous studies.

Human evolved regulatory elements modulate genes involved in cortical expansion and neurodevelopmental disease susceptibility.

Modern genetic studies indicate that human brain evolution is driven primarily by changes in gene regulation, which requires understanding the biological function of largely non-coding gene regulatory elements, many of which act in tissue specific manner. We leverage chromatin interaction profiles in human fetal and adult cortex to assign three classes of human-evolved elements to putative target genes. We find that human-evolved elements involving DNA sequence changes and those involving epigenetic changes are associated with human-specific gene regulation via effects on different classes of genes representing distinct biological pathways.

Shared molecular neuropathology across major psychiatric disorders parallels polygenic overlap.

The predisposition to neuropsychiatric disease involves a complex, polygenic, and pleiotropic genetic architecture. However, little is known about how genetic variants impart brain dysfunction or pathology. We used transcriptomic profiling as a quantitative readout of molecular brain-based phenotypes across five major psychiatric disorders-autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and alcoholism-compared with matched controls.

The functional spectrum of low-frequency coding variation.

Background: Rare coding variants constitute an important class of human genetic variation, but are underrepresented in current databases that are based on small population samples. Recent studies show that variants altering amino acid sequence and protein function are enriched at low variant allele frequency, 2 to 5%, but because of insufficient sample size it is not clear if the same trend holds for rare variants below 1% allele frequency.

Results: The 1000 Genomes Exon Pilot Project has collected deep-coverage exon-capture data in roughly 1,000 human genes, for nearly 700 samples.

Variation in genome-wide mutation rates within and between human families.

J.B.S.