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. 2020 Apr 16:11:270.
doi: 10.3389/fgene.2020.00270. eCollection 2020.

Identifying Shared Risk Genes for Asthma, Hay Fever, and Eczema by Multi-Trait and Multiomic Association Analyses

Hongping Guo  1   2 , Jiyuan An  3 , Zuguo Yu  1   4
Affiliations

Identifying Shared Risk Genes for Asthma, Hay Fever, and Eczema by Multi-Trait and Multiomic Association Analyses

Hongping Guo et al. Front Genet. .

Abstract

Asthma, hay fever and eczema are three comorbid diseases with high prevalence and heritability. Their common genetic architectures have not been well-elucidated. In this study, we first conducted a linkage disequilibrium score regression analysis to confirm the strong genetic correlations between asthma, hay fever and eczema. We then integrated three distinct association analyses (metaCCA multi-trait association analysis, MAGMA genome-wide and MetaXcan transcriptome-wide gene-based tests) to identify shared risk genes based on the large-scale GWAS results in the GeneATLAS database. MetaCCA can detect pleiotropic genes associated with these three diseases jointly. MAGMA and MetaXcan were performed separately to identify candidate risk genes for each of the three diseases. We finally identified 150 shared risk genes, in which 60 genes are novel. Functional enrichment analysis revealed that the shared risk genes are enriched in inflammatory bowel disease, T cells differentiation and other related biological pathways. Our work may provide help on treatment of asthma, hay fever and eczema in clinical applications.

Keywords: association studies; asthma; eczema; hay fever; multi-trait; multiomic; shared genes.

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Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Flow chart of the present work.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Venn diagram of the pleiotropic genes identified by metaCCA (A) and the combined genes identified by MAGMA and/or MetaXcan for asthma (B), hay fever (C) and eczema (D).
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Bubble chart of enrichment analysis of shared risk genes (excluding those in MHC region).
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
PPI network for shared risk genes (excluding those in MHC region).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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