Quantifying concordant genetic effects of de novo mutations on multiple disorders
Abstract
Exome sequencing on tens of thousands of parent-proband trios has identified numerous deleterious de novo mutations (DNMs) and implicated risk genes for many disorders. Recent studies have suggested shared genes and pathways are enriched for DNMs across multiple disorders. However, existing analytic strategies only focus on genes that reach statistical significance for multiple disorders and require large trio samples in each study. As a result, these methods are not able to characterize the full landscape of genetic sharing due to polygenicity and incomplete penetrance. In this work, we introduce EncoreDNM, a novel statistical framework to quantify shared genetic effects between two disorders characterized by concordant enrichment of DNMs in the exome. EncoreDNM makes use of exome-wide, summary-level DNM data, including genes that do not reach statistical significance in single-disorder analysis, to evaluate the overall and annotation-partitioned genetic sharing between two disorders. Applying EncoreDNM to DNM data of nine disorders, we identified abundant pairwise enrichment correlations, especially in genes intolerant to pathogenic mutations and genes highly expressed in fetal tissues. These results suggest that EncoreDNM improves current analytic approaches and may have broad applications in DNM studies.
Data availability
The current manuscript is a computational study, so no data have been generated for this manuscript.
-
Evidence for 28 genetic disorders discovered by combining healthcare and research datahttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2832-5.
-
Large-Scale Exome Sequencing Study Implicates Both Developmental and Functional Changes in the Neurobiology of Autismhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.12.036.
-
Exome sequencing in schizophrenia-affected parent-offspring trios reveals risk conferred by protein-coding de novo mutationshttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-019-0564-3.
-
Contribution of rare inherited and de novo variants in 2,871 congenital heart disease probandshttps://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3970.
-
Meta-analysis of 2,104 trios provides support for 10 new genes for intellectual disabilityhttps://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4352.
-
De Novo Coding Variants Are Strongly Associated with Tourette Disorderhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2017.04.024.
-
De novo mutations in epileptic encephalopathieshttps://doi.org/10.1038/nature12439.
-
Mutations disrupting neuritogenesis genes confer risk for cerebral palsyhttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-020-0695-1.
-
Exome sequencing implicates genetic disruption of prenatal neuro-gliogenesis in sporadic congenital hydrocephalushttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-1090-2.
-
Excess of rare, inherited truncating mutations in autismhttps://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3303.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Science Foundation of China (No. 12071243)
- Lin Hou
Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project (No. 2017SHZDZX01)
- Lin Hou
Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation
- Qiongshi Lu
Waisman Center pilot grant program at University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Qiongshi Lu
National Institutes of Health (No. R03HD100883 and R01GM134005)
- Hongyu Zhao
National Science Foundation (DMS 1902903)
- Hongyu Zhao
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2022, Guo 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.
Metrics
-
- 984
- views
-
- 197
- downloads
-
- 4
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Genetics and Genomics
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
Evolution of gene expression frequently drives antibiotic resistance in bacteria. We had previously (Patel and Matange, eLife, 2021) shown that, in Escherichia coli, mutations at the mgrB locus were beneficial under trimethoprim exposure and led to overexpression of dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR), encoded by the folA gene. Here, we show that DHFR levels are further enhanced by spontaneous duplication of a genomic segment encompassing folA and spanning hundreds of kilobases. This duplication was rare in wild-type E. coli. However, its frequency was elevated in a lon-knockout strain, altering the mutational landscape early during trimethoprim adaptation. We then exploit this system to investigate the relationship between trimethoprim pressure and folA copy number. During long-term evolution, folA duplications were frequently reversed. Reversal was slower under antibiotic pressure, first requiring the acquisition of point mutations in DHFR or its promoter. Unexpectedly, despite resistance-conferring point mutations, some populations under high trimethoprim pressure maintained folA duplication to compensate for low abundance DHFR mutants. We find that evolution of gene dosage depends on expression demand, which is generated by antibiotic and exacerbated by proteolysis of drug-resistant mutants of DHFR. We propose a novel role for proteostasis as a determinant of copy number evolution in antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
-
- Developmental Biology
- Genetics and Genomics
The establishment and growth of the arterial endothelium require the coordinated expression of numerous genes. However, regulation of this process is not yet fully understood. Here, we combined in silico analysis with transgenic mice and zebrafish models to characterize arterial-specific enhancers associated with eight key arterial identity genes (Acvrl1/Alk1, Cxcr4, Cxcl12, Efnb2, Gja4/Cx37, Gja5/Cx40, Nrp1, and Unc5b). Next, to elucidate the regulatory pathways upstream of arterial gene transcription, we investigated the transcription factors binding each arterial enhancer compared to a similar assessment of non-arterial endothelial enhancers. These results found that binding of SOXF and ETS factors was a common occurrence at both arterial and pan-endothelial enhancers, suggesting neither are sufficient to direct arterial specificity. Conversely, FOX motifs independent of ETS motifs were over-represented at arterial enhancers. Further, MEF2 and RBPJ binding was enriched but not ubiquitous at arterial enhancers, potentially linked to specific patterns of behaviour within the arterial endothelium. Lastly, there was no shared or arterial-specific signature for WNT-associated TCF/LEF, TGFβ/BMP-associated SMAD1/5 and SMAD2/3, shear stress-associated KLF4, or venous-enriched NR2F2. This cohort of well-characterized and in vivo-verified enhancers can now provide a platform for future studies into the interaction of different transcriptional and signaling pathways with arterial gene expression.