Validation of an Integrated Risk Tool, Including Polygenic Risk Score, for Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease in Multiple Ethnicities and Ancestries.

The American College of Cardiology / American Heart Association pooled cohort equations tool (ASCVD-PCE) is currently recommended to assess 10-year risk for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD). ASCVD-PCE does not currently include genetic risk factors. Polygenic risk scores (PRSs) have been shown to offer a powerful new approach to measuring genetic risk for common diseases, including ASCVD, and to enhance risk prediction when combined with ASCVD-PCE.

Integrated Polygenic Tool Substantially Enhances Coronary Artery Disease Prediction.

Background: There is considerable interest in whether genetic data can be used to improve standard cardiovascular disease risk calculators, as the latter are routinely used in clinical practice to manage preventative treatment.

Methods: Using the UK Biobank resource, we developed our own polygenic risk score for coronary artery disease (CAD). We used an additional 60 000 UK Biobank individuals to develop an integrated risk tool (IRT) that combined our polygenic risk score with established risk tools (either the American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology pooled cohort equations [PCE] or UK QRISK3), and we tested our IRT in an additional, independent set of 186 451 UK Biobank individuals.

Comprehensive Analysis of Constraint on the Spatial Distribution of Missense Variants in Human Protein Structures.

The spatial distribution of genetic variation within proteins is shaped by evolutionary constraint and provides insight into the functional importance of protein regions and the potential pathogenicity of protein alterations. Here, we comprehensively evaluate the 3D spatial patterns of human germline and somatic variation in 6,604 experimentally derived protein structures and 33,144 computationally derived homology models covering 77% of all human proteins. Using a systematic approach, we quantify differences in the spatial distributions of neutral germline variants, disease-causing germline variants, and recurrent somatic variants.

Three-dimensional spatial analysis of missense variants in RTEL1 identifies pathogenic variants in patients with Familial Interstitial Pneumonia.

Background: Next-generation sequencing of individuals with genetic diseases often detects candidate rare variants in numerous genes, but determining which are causal remains challenging. We hypothesized that the spatial distribution of missense variants in protein structures contains information about function and pathogenicity that can help prioritize variants of unknown significance (VUS) and elucidate the structural mechanisms leading to disease.

Results: To illustrate this approach in a clinical application, we analyzed 13 candidate missense variants in regulator of telomere elongation helicase 1 (RTEL1) identified in patients with Familial Interstitial Pneumonia (FIP).

SIRT4 Is a Lysine Deacylase that Controls Leucine Metabolism and Insulin Secretion.

Sirtuins are NAD-dependent protein deacylases that regulate several aspects of metabolism and aging. In contrast to the other mammalian sirtuins, the primary enzymatic activity of mitochondrial sirtuin 4 (SIRT4) and its overall role in metabolic control have remained enigmatic. Using a combination of phylogenetics, structural biology, and enzymology, we show that SIRT4 removes three acyl moieties from lysine residues: methylglutaryl (MG)-, hydroxymethylglutaryl (HMG)-, and 3-methylglutaconyl (MGc)-lysine.

XPA: A key scaffold for human nucleotide excision repair.

Nucleotide excision repair (NER) is essential for removing many types of DNA lesions from the genome, yet the mechanisms of NER in humans remain poorly understood. This review summarizes our current understanding of the structure, biochemistry, interaction partners, mechanisms, and disease-associated mutations of one of the critical NER proteins, XPA.

Rapid storage and retrieval of genomic intervals from a relational database system using nested containment lists.

Efficient storage and retrieval of genomic annotations based on range intervals is necessary, given the amount of data produced by next-generation sequencing studies. The indexing strategies of relational database systems (such as MySQL) greatly inhibit their use in genomic annotation tasks. This has led to the development of stand-alone applications that are dependent on flat-file libraries.

Knowledge-constrained K-medoids Clustering of Regulatory Rare Alleles for Burden Tests.

Rarely occurring genetic variants are hypothesized to influence human diseases, but statistically associating these rare variants to disease is challenging due to a lack of statistical power in most feasibly sized datasets. Several statistical tests have been developed to either collapse multiple rare variants from a genomic region into a single variable (presence/absence) or to tally the number of rare alleles within a region, relating the burden of rare alleles to disease risk. Both these approaches, however, rely on user-specification of a genomic region to generate these collapsed or burden variables, usually an entire gene.

Entropy, semantic relatedness and proximity.

Although word co-occurrences within a document have been demonstrated to be semantically useful, word interactions over a local range have been largely neglected by psychologists due to practical challenges. Shannon's (Bell Systems Technical Journal, 27, 379-423, 623-665, 1948) conceptualization of information theory suggests that these interactions should be useful for understanding communication. Computational advances make an examination of local word-word interactions possible for a large text corpus.