Psychosocial experiences modulate asthma-associated genes through gene-environment interactions
- Wayne State University, United States
- Miami University, United States
- University of Michigan, United States
- University of South Florida, United States
Abstract
Social interactions and the overall psychosocial environment have a demonstrated impact on health, particularly for people living in disadvantaged urban areas. Here we investigated the effect of psychosocial experiences on gene expression in peripheral blood immune cells of children with asthma in Metro Detroit. Using RNA-sequencing and a new machine learning approach, we identified transcriptional signatures of 19 variables including psychosocial factors, blood cell composition and asthma symptoms. Importantly, we found 169 genes associated with asthma or allergic disease that are regulated by psychosocial factors, and 344 significant gene-environment interactions for gene expression levels. These results demonstrate that immune gene expression mediates the link between negative psychosocial experiences and asthma risk.
Data availability
The data are available on dbGAP. Accession number: phs002182.v1.p1.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R01HL114097)
- Samuele Zilioli
- Richard B Slatcher
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Participants were included from an ongoing longitudinal study, Asthma in the Lives of Families Today (ALOFT; recruited from November 2010-July 2018, Wayne State University Institutional Review Board approval #0412110B3F).
Copyright
© 2021, Resztak et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Psychosocial experiences modulate asthma-associated genes through gene-environment interactions
eLife 10:e63852.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.63852
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