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. 2020;76(4):1553-1565.
doi: 10.3233/JAD-200037.

Whole-Exome Sequencing Analysis of Alzheimer's Disease in Non-APOE*4 Carriers

Kang-Hsien Fan  1 , Eleanor Feingold  1 , Samantha L Rosenthal  1 , F Yesim Demirci  1 , Mary Ganguli  2 , Oscar L Lopez  3 , M Ilyas Kamboh  1
Affiliations

Whole-Exome Sequencing Analysis of Alzheimer's Disease in Non-APOE*4 Carriers

Kang-Hsien Fan et al. J Alzheimers Dis. 2020.

Abstract

The genetics of late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD) is complex due to the heterogeneous nature of the disorder. APOE*4 is the strongest genetic risk factor for AD. Genome-wide association studies have identified more than 30 additional loci, each having relatively small effect size. Known AD loci explain only about 30% of the genetic variance, and thus much of the genetic variance remains unexplained. To identify some of the missing heritability of AD, we analyzed whole-exome sequencing (WES) data focusing on non-APOE*4 carriers from two WES datasets: 720 cases and controls from the University of Pittsburgh and 7,252 cases and controls from the Alzheimer's Disease Sequencing Project. Following separate WES analyses in each dataset, we performed meta-analysis for overlapping markers present in both datasets. Among the four variants reaching the exome-wide significance threshold, three were from known AD loci: APOE/rs7412 (odds ratio (OR) = 0.40; p = 5.46E-24), TOMM40/rs157581 (OR = 1.49; p = 4.04E-07), and TREM2/rs75932628 (OR = 4.00; p = 1.15E-07). The fourth significant variant, rs199533, was from a novel locus on chromosome 17 in the NSF gene (OR = 0.78; p = 2.88E-07). NSF was also significant in the gene-based analysis (p = 1.20E-05). In the GTEx data, NSF/rs199533 is a cis-eQTL for multiple genes in the brain and blood, including NSF that is highly expressed across all brain tissues, including regions that typically show amyloid-β accumulation. Further characterization of genes that are affected by NSF/rs199533 may help to shed light on the roles of these genes in AD etiology.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; NSF gene; genetics; whole-exome sequencing.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Age distributions between AD cases and controls in PITT-ADRC and ADSP data. The black dots inside the density represent the mean and the bar represent the one standard deviation on the both sides of the mean.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Manhattan plot of meta-analysis (a) with age and (b) without age. There were a total of 56,460 common bi-allelic variants in both studies. The redline represents the exome-wide significant level at 8.12E-07 and the blue line represents the suggestive significant threshold at 1.62E-05. The most significant APOE*2 allele is not shown in the figure (rs4712; age: p=5.46E-24; no age: p=7.53E-26).
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
The heatmap of the tissue specific gene expression for 21 genes captured in different brain regions and whole blood from Genotype-Tissue Expression project (GTEx) v6 53 tissue types dataset
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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