Background: Myocardial infarction (MI) is a complex disease caused by both lifestyle and genetic factors. This study aims to investigate the predictive value of genetic risk, in addition to traditional cardiovascular risk factors, for recurrent events following early-onset MI.
Methods: The Italian Genetic Study of Early-Onset Myocardial Infarction is a cohort study enrolling patients with MI before 45 years.
The NHGRI-EBI GWAS Catalog serves as a vital resource for the genetic research community, providing access to the most comprehensive database of human GWAS results. Currently, it contains close to 7 000 publications for >15 000 traits, from which more than 625 000 lead associations have been curated. Additionally, 85 000 full genome-wide summary statistics datasets-containing association data for all variants in the analysis-are available for downstream analyses such as meta-analysis, fine-mapping, Mendelian randomisation or development of polygenic risk scores.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe NHGRI-EBI GWAS Catalog serves as a vital resource for the genetic research community, providing access to the most comprehensive database of human GWAS results. Currently, it contains close to 7,000 publications for more than 15,000 traits, from which more than 625,000 lead associations have been curated. Additionally, 85,000 full genome-wide summary statistics datasets - containing association data for all variants in the analysis - are available for downstream analyses such as meta-analysis, fine-mapping, Mendelian randomisation or development of polygenic risk scores.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCombining information from multiple GWASs for a disease and its risk factors has proven a powerful approach for development of polygenic risk scores (PRSs). This may be particularly useful for type 2 diabetes (T2D), a highly polygenic and heterogeneous disease where the additional predictive value of a PRS is unclear. Here, we use a meta-scoring approach to develop a metaPRS for T2D that incorporated genome-wide associations from both European and non-European genetic ancestries and T2D risk factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMethods of estimating polygenic scores (PGSs) from genome-wide association studies are increasingly utilized. However, independent method evaluation is lacking, and method comparisons are often limited. Here, we evaluate polygenic scores derived via seven methods in five biobank studies (totaling about 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolygenic scores (PGS) have transformed human genetic research and have multiple potential clinical applications, including risk stratification for disease prevention and prediction of treatment response. Here, we present a series of recent enhancements to the PGS Catalog (www.PGSCatalog.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBlood cell phenotypes are routinely tested in healthcare to inform clinical decisions. Genetic variants influencing mean blood cell phenotypes have been used to understand disease aetiology and improve prediction; however, additional information may be captured by genetic effects on observed variance. Here, we mapped variance quantitative trait loci (vQTL), i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolygenic scores (PGS) can be used for risk stratification by quantifying individuals' genetic predisposition to disease, and many potentially clinically useful applications have been proposed. Here, we review the latest potential benefits of PGS in the clinic and challenges to implementation. PGS could augment risk stratification through combined use with traditional risk factors (demographics, disease-specific risk factors, family history, etc.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe use of omic modalities to dissect the molecular underpinnings of common diseases and traits is becoming increasingly common. But multi-omic traits can be genetically predicted, which enables highly cost-effective and powerful analyses for studies that do not have multi-omics. Here we examine a large cohort (the INTERVAL study; n = 50,000 participants) with extensive multi-omic data for plasma proteomics (SomaScan, n = 3,175; Olink, n = 4,822), plasma metabolomics (Metabolon HD4, n = 8,153), serum metabolomics (Nightingale, n = 37,359) and whole-blood Illumina RNA sequencing (n = 4,136), and use machine learning to train genetic scores for 17,227 molecular traits, including 10,521 that reach Bonferroni-adjusted significance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe aim of this patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) work was to explore improvised theatre as a tool for facilitating bi-directional dialogue between researchers and patients/members of the public on the topic of polygenic risk scores (PRS) use within primary or secondary care. PRS are a tool to quantify genetic risk for a heritable disease or trait and may be used to predict future health outcomes. In the United Kingdom (UK), they are often cited as a next-in-line public health tool to be implemented, and their use in consumer genetic testing as well as patient-facing settings is increasing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMetabolic biomarker data quantified by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy in approximately 121,000 UK Biobank participants has recently been released as a community resource, comprising absolute concentrations and ratios of 249 circulating metabolites, lipids, and lipoprotein sub-fractions. Here we identify and characterise additional sources of unwanted technical variation influencing individual biomarkers in the data available to download from UK Biobank. These included sample preparation time, shipping plate well, spectrometer batch effects, drift over time within spectrometer, and outlier shipping plates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding how genetic variants influence disease risk and complex traits (variant-to-function) is one of the major challenges in human genetics. Here we present a model-driven framework to leverage human genome-scale metabolic networks to define how genetic variants affect biochemical reaction fluxes across major human tissues, including skeletal muscle, adipose, liver, brain and heart. As proof of concept, we build personalised organ-specific metabolic flux models for 524,615 individuals of the INTERVAL and UK Biobank cohorts and perform a fluxome-wide association study (FWAS) to identify 4312 associations between personalised flux values and the concentration of metabolites in blood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividuals with South Asian ancestry have a higher risk of heart disease than other groups but have been largely excluded from genetic research. Using data from 22,000 British Pakistani and Bangladeshi individuals with linked electronic health records from the Genes & Health cohort, we conducted genome-wide association studies of coronary artery disease and its key risk factors. Using power-adjusted transferability ratios, we found evidence for transferability for the majority of cardiometabolic loci powered to replicate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCardiometabolic diseases are frequently polygenic in architecture, comprising a large number of risk alleles with small effects spread across the genome. Polygenic scores (PGS) aggregate these into a metric representing an individual's genetic predisposition to disease. PGS have shown promise for early risk prediction and there is an open question as to whether PGS can also be used to understand disease biology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present the Polygenic Score (PGS) Catalog (https://www.PGSCatalog.org), an open resource of published scores (including variants, alleles and weights) and consistently curated metadata required for reproducibility and independent applications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPolygenic risk scores (PRSs), which often aggregate results from genome-wide association studies, can bridge the gap between initial discovery efforts and clinical applications for the estimation of disease risk using genetics. However, there is notable heterogeneity in the application and reporting of these risk scores, which hinders the translation of PRSs into clinical care. Here, in a collaboration between the Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen) Complex Disease Working Group and the Polygenic Score (PGS) Catalog, we present the Polygenic Risk Score Reporting Standards (PRS-RS), in which we update the Genetic Risk Prediction Studies (GRIPS) Statement to reflect the present state of the field.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrediction of disease risk is an essential part of preventative medicine, often guiding clinical management. Risk prediction typically includes risk factors such as age, sex, family history of disease and lifestyle (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTranscription factor (TF) binding specificities (motifs) are essential for the analysis of gene regulation. Accurate prediction of TF motifs is critical, because it is infeasible to assay all TFs in all sequenced eukaryotic genomes. There is ongoing controversy regarding the degree of motif diversification among related species that is, in part, because of uncertainty in motif prediction methods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTranscription factors (TFs) recognize specific DNA sequences to control chromatin and transcription, forming a complex system that guides expression of the genome. Despite keen interest in understanding how TFs control gene expression, it remains challenging to determine how the precise genomic binding sites of TFs are specified and how TF binding ultimately relates to regulation of transcription. This review considers how TFs are identified and functionally characterized, principally through the lens of a catalog of over 1,600 likely human TFs and binding motifs for two-thirds of them.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFKRAB C2H2 zinc finger proteins (KZNFs) are the largest and most diverse family of human transcription factors, likely due to diversifying selection driven by novel endogenous retroelements (EREs), but the vast majority lack binding motifs or functional data. Two recent studies analyzed a majority of the human KZNFs using either ChIP-seq (60 proteins) or ChIP-exo (221 proteins) in the same cell type (HEK293). The ChIP-exo paper did not describe binding motifs, however.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Measuring motif similarity is essential for identifying functionally related transcription factors (TFs) and RNA-binding proteins, and for annotating de novo motifs. Here, we describe Motif Similarity Based on Affinity of Targets (MoSBAT), an approach for measuring the similarity of motifs by computing their affinity profiles across a large number of random sequences. We show that MoSBAT successfully associates de novo ChIP-seq motifs with their respective TFs, accurately identifies motifs that are obtained from the same TF in different in vitro assays, and quantitatively reflects the similarity of in vitro binding preferences for pairs of TFs.
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