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A solution to screening for recessive heritable disorders and identifying genetic influences on common diseases is to be found in the history of one of the world's most populous regions. Large South Asian populations are a mosaic of smaller populations, many of which have founder effects as extreme as those in the European isolates that first inspired genetic medicine.
Genetic and functional analyses of 120 mouse strains have identified a heart regeneration candidate gene that modulates the contractile sarcomeric apparatus. This gene, Tnni3k, controls the frequency of the mononuclear, diploid cardiomyocyte population, which affects cardiomyocyte proliferative potential after injury.
ERG overexpression in prostate cancers promotes the development of widespread changes in gene expression and chromatin landscapes, leading to redistribution of key transcription factors in prostate cancers positive for the TMPRSS2-ERG fusion gene. The overexpression of ERG is further assisted by the development of a super-enhancer in the ERG locus.
An innovative study analyzing genetic association across tree-structured routine healthcare data in the UK Biobank represents a new branch on a tree that is poised to grow rapidly and offer new kinds of insights on how genome variation relates to human health and disease. Indeed, this tree is likely to offer new kinds of insights into the very nature of human disease.
Wayne Powell and colleagues compare the different tools and approaches used by the plant breeding community versus the animal breeding community for crop and livestock improvement. They argue that the two disciplines can be united via adoption of genomic selection along with the exchange of resources and techniques between the two areas.
Jian Yang and colleagues explore the uses and abuses of heritability estimates derived from pedigrees and from GWAS SNPs and make recommendations for best practice in future applications of SNP-based heritability.
Gil McVean and colleagues present a new Bayesian analysis framework that exploits the hierarchical structure of diagnosis classifications to analyze genetic variants against UK Biobank disease phenotypes derived from self-reporting and hospital episode statistics. Their method displays increased power to detect genetic effects over other approaches and identifies novel associations between classical HLA alleles and common immune-mediated diseases.
Andrey Rzhetsky and colleagues analyze electronic medical records from over one-third of the US population to estimate disease heritability and to determine the genetic and environmental contributions to disease variance. They obtain 84 new heritability estimates and find that the genetic correlation values for disease pairs differ from their environmental correlation values.
Kevin Brown and colleagues functionally characterize a melanoma risk locus encompassing PARP1, correlating the risk genotype to PARP1 gene expression levels in melanoma cells. They identify an intronic gene-regulatory variant in PARP1 and find that PARP1 can promote cell proliferation and rescue oncogene-induced senescence, likely through MITF.
Mathieu Lupien and colleagues analyze data from primary prostate tumors with and without TMPRSS2–ERG (T2E) rearrangements. They find that in T2E tumors, there is a distinct regulatory landscape resulting from the co-option of transcription factors by ERG which causes dependency on NOTCH signaling.
Henry Sucov and colleagues demonstrate substantial natural variation in the capacity of the mouse heart to regenerate after injury and link this to the prevalence of mononuclear diploid cardiomyocytes. They identify Tnni3k as one gene that contributes to the observed variation and validate its role through mouse knockout and zebrafish overexpression studies.
Ernesto Guccione and colleagues report that the transcription factor PRDM15 regulates naive pluripotency in mouse embryos and embryonic stem cells and in derivation of mouse and human iPSCs. They further show that PRDM15 promotes WNT signaling and inhibits MAPK–ERK signaling by directly regulating the expression of R-spondin1 and Sprouty1, respectively.
Peter Balint-Kurti, Qin Yang and colleagues report that ZmCCoAOMT2, which encodes a caffeoyl-CoA O-methyltransferase, is a gene within the quantitative trait locus qMdr9.02, which confers resistance to southern leaf blight and gray leaf spot. Their findings suggest that resistance might be caused by differences in levels of lignin and other metabolites in the phenylpropanoid pathway.
Sven van der Lee, Julie Williams, Gerard Schellenberg and colleagues identify rare coding variants in PLCG2, ABI3 and TREM2 associated with Alzheimer's disease. These genes are highly expressed in microglia and provide additional evidence that the microglia-mediated immune response contributes to the development of Alzheimer's disease.
Hugh Watkins and colleagues meta-analyze data from the UK Biobank along with recent genome-wide association studies for coronary artery disease. They identify 13 new loci that were genome-wide significant and 243 loci at a 5% false discovery rate.
Sekar Kathiresan and colleagues perform a genome-wide association test for coronary artery disease (CAD) using data from the UK Biobank. They identify 15 new loci and perform phenome-wide association scanning, implicating insulin resistance pathways and transendothelial migration of leukocytes in CAD.
Daniel Gudbjartsson, Kari Stefansson and colleagues assess the effect of variants associated with mean fasting glucose levels on the variance in fasting glucose levels. They find that variants that increase both the levels and variance of fasting glucose increase type 2 diabetes risk, whereas those that increase the levels but reduce the variance do not.
Kumarasamy Thangaraj, David Reich and colleagues identify 81 South Asian groups descended from extreme founder events, including 14 with a census size of over 1 million people, thus providing an opportunity to test for and decrease the burden of recessive genetic diseases in these populations.
Isabelle Janoueix-Lerosey, Valentina Boeva and colleagues analyze the super-enhancer landscape of 25 neuroblastoma cell lines to define core regulatory circuits controlling gene expression programs. They find and functionally characterize two types of cell identity that contribute to the tumor heterogeneity of neuroblastoma.
