Modeling disease risk through analysis of physical interactions between genetic variants within chromatin regulatory circuitry.

SNPs associated with disease susceptibility often reside in enhancer clusters, or super-enhancers. Constituents of these enhancer clusters cooperate to regulate target genes and often extend beyond the linkage disequilibrium (LD) blocks containing risk SNPs identified in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). We identified 'outside variants', defined as SNPs in weak LD with GWAS risk SNPs that physically interact with risk SNPs as part of a target gene's regulatory circuitry.