Integrative Genetic and Epigenetic Analysis Uncovers Regulatory Mechanisms of Autoimmune Disease.

Genome-wide association studies in autoimmune and inflammatory diseases (AID) have uncovered hundreds of loci mediating risk. These associations are preferentially located in non-coding DNA regions and in particular in tissue-specific DNase I hypersensitivity sites (DHSs). While these analyses clearly demonstrate the overall enrichment of disease risk alleles on gene regulatory regions, they are not designed to identify individual regulatory regions mediating risk or the genes under their control, and thus uncover the specific molecular events driving disease risk.

Large-Scale trans-eQTLs Affect Hundreds of Transcripts and Mediate Patterns of Transcriptional Co-regulation.

Efforts to decipher the causal relationships between differences in gene regulation and corresponding differences in phenotype have been stymied by several basic technical challenges. Although detecting local, cis-eQTLs is now routine, trans-eQTLs, which are distant from the genes of origin, are far more difficult to find because millions of SNPs must currently be compared to thousands of transcripts. Here, we demonstrate an alternative approach: we looked for SNPs associated with the expression of many genes simultaneously and found that hundreds of trans-eQTLs each affect hundreds of transcripts in lymphoblastoid cell lines across three African populations.