Anatomy and Neuroscience - Research Publications

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    Fine-Mapping the Genetic Association of the Major Histocompatibility Complex in Multiple Sclerosis: HLA and Non-HLA Effects
    Patsopoulos, NA ; Barcellos, LF ; Hintzen, RQ ; Schaefer, C ; Van Duijn, CM ; Noble, JA ; Raj, T ; Gourraud, P-A ; Stranger, BE ; Oksenberg, J ; Olsson, T ; Taylor, BV ; Sawcer, S ; Hafler, DA ; Carrington, M ; De Jager, PL ; De Bakker, PIW ; Gibson, G (PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2013-11)
    The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) region is strongly associated with multiple sclerosis (MS) susceptibility. HLA-DRB1*15:01 has the strongest effect, and several other alleles have been reported at different levels of validation. Using SNP data from genome-wide studies, we imputed and tested classical alleles and amino acid polymorphisms in 8 classical human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes in 5,091 cases and 9,595 controls. We identified 11 statistically independent effects overall: 6 HLA-DRB1 and one DPB1 alleles in class II, one HLA-A and two B alleles in class I, and one signal in a region spanning from MICB to LST1. This genomic segment does not contain any HLA class I or II genes and provides robust evidence for the involvement of a non-HLA risk allele within the MHC. Interestingly, this region contains the TNF gene, the cognate ligand of the well-validated TNFRSF1A MS susceptibility gene. The classical HLA effects can be explained to some extent by polymorphic amino acid positions in the peptide-binding grooves. This study dissects the independent effects in the MHC, a critical region for MS susceptibility that harbors multiple risk alleles.
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    Identity-by-Descent Mapping to Detect Rare Variants Conferring Susceptibility to Multiple Sclerosis
    Lin, R ; Charlesworth, J ; Stankovich, J ; Perreau, VM ; Brown, MA ; Taylor, BV ; Toland, AE (PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2013-03-05)
    Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified around 60 common variants associated with multiple sclerosis (MS), but these loci only explain a fraction of the heritability of MS. Some missing heritability may be caused by rare variants that have been suggested to play an important role in the aetiology of complex diseases such as MS. However current genetic and statistical methods for detecting rare variants are expensive and time consuming. 'Population-based linkage analysis' (PBLA) or so called identity-by-descent (IBD) mapping is a novel way to detect rare variants in extant GWAS datasets. We employed BEAGLE fastIBD to search for rare MS variants utilising IBD mapping in a large GWAS dataset of 3,543 cases and 5,898 controls. We identified a genome-wide significant linkage signal on chromosome 19 (LOD = 4.65; p = 1.9×10(-6)). Network analysis of cases and controls sharing haplotypes on chromosome 19 further strengthened the association as there are more large networks of cases sharing haplotypes than controls. This linkage region includes a cluster of zinc finger genes of unknown function. Analysis of genome wide transcriptome data suggests that genes in this zinc finger cluster may be involved in very early developmental regulation of the CNS. Our study also indicates that BEAGLE fastIBD allowed identification of rare variants in large unrelated population with moderate computational intensity. Even with the development of whole-genome sequencing, IBD mapping still may be a promising way to narrow down the region of interest for sequencing priority.
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    Closing the case of APOE in multiple sclerosis: no association with disease risk in over 29 000 subjects
    Lill, CM ; Liu, T ; Schjeide, B-MM ; Roehr, JT ; Akkad, DA ; Damotte, V ; Alcina, A ; Ortiz, MA ; Arroyo, R ; Lopez de lapuente, A ; Blaschke, P ; Winkelmann, A ; Gerdes, L-A ; Luessi, F ; Fernadez, O ; Izquierdo, G ; Antigueedad, A ; Hoffjan, S ; Cournu-Rebeix, I ; Gromoeller, S ; Faber, H ; Liebsch, M ; Meissner, E ; Chanvillard, C ; Touze, E ; Pico, F ; Corcia, P ; Doerner, T ; Steinhagen-Thiessen, E ; Baeckman, L ; Heekeren, HR ; Li, S-C ; Lindenberger, U ; Chan, A ; Hartung, H-P ; Aktas, O ; Lohse, P ; Kuempfel, T ; Kubisch, C ; Epplen, JT ; Zettl, UK ; Fontaine, B ; Vandenbroeck, K ; Matesanz, F ; Urcelay, E ; Bertram, L ; Zipp, F (BMJ PUBLISHING GROUP, 2012-09)
    BACKGROUND: Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) rs429358 (ε4) and rs7412 (ε2), both invoking changes in the amino-acid sequence of the apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene, have previously been tested for association with multiple sclerosis (MS) risk. However, none of these studies was sufficiently powered to detect modest effect sizes at acceptable type-I error rates. As both SNPs are only imperfectly captured on commonly used microarray genotyping platforms, their evaluation in the context of genome-wide association studies has been hindered until recently. METHODS: We genotyped 12 740 subjects hitherto not studied for their APOE status, imputed raw genotype data from 8739 subjects from five independent genome-wide association studies datasets using the most recent high-resolution reference panels, and extracted genotype data for 8265 subjects from previous candidate gene assessments. RESULTS: Despite sufficient power to detect associations at genome-wide significance thresholds across a range of ORs, our analyses did not support a role of rs429358 or rs7412 on MS susceptibility. This included meta-analyses of the combined data across 13 913 MS cases and 15 831 controls (OR=0.95, p=0.259, and OR 1.07, p=0.0569, for rs429358 and rs7412, respectively). CONCLUSION: Given the large sample size of our analyses, it is unlikely that the two APOE missense SNPs studied here exert any relevant effects on MS susceptibility.
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    Identity-by-Descent Mapping to Detect Rare Variants Conferring Susceptibility to Multiple Sclerosis
    Lin, Rui ; Charlesworth, Jac ; Stankovich, Jim ; PERREAU, VICTORIA ; Brown, Matthew ; TAYLOR, BRUCE ( 2012)