Assessment of ANG variants in Parkinson's disease

Abstract

Genetic risk factors are occasionally shared between different neurodegenerative diseases. Previous studies have linked ANG, a gene encoding angiogenin, to both Parkinson's disease (PD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Functional studies suggest ANG plays a neuroprotective role in both PD and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis by reducing cell death. We further explored the genetic association between ANG and PD by analyzing genotype data from the International Parkinson's Disease Genomics Consortium (14,671 cases and 17,667 controls) and whole genome sequencing data from the Accelerating Medicines Partnership - Parkinson's disease initiative (AMP-PD, https://amp-pd.org/) (1,647 cases and 1,050 controls). Our analysis did not replicate the findings of previous studies and identified no significant association between ANG variants and PD risk.

Keywords: ANG; Parkinson's disease; Risk factor.

Figure 1.. Locus zoom plots for ANG and PD risk and ALS risk.

The −log₁₀(p-value) of variants on or near ANG are shown on the y-axis, and base-pair position of each variant is on the x-axis. P-values are taken from the PD risk GWAS (Figure 1A) and the ALS risk GWAS (Figure 1B). Variants are colored by their R² linkage disequilibrium value which is relative to the variant with the lowest p-value on these plots (colored purple). The genome-wide significance cutoff line for multiple test correction is included in black. Recombination rates are included in blue (Pruim et al. 2010).