Finding Needles in the Haystack: Strategies for Uncovering Noncoding Regulatory Variants

Abstract

Despite accumulating evidence implicating noncoding variants in human diseases, unraveling their functionality remains a significant challenge. Systematic annotations of the regulatory landscape and the growth of sequence variant data sets have fueled the development of tools and methods to identify causal noncoding variants and evaluate their regulatory effects. Here, we review the latest advances in the field and discuss potential future research avenues to gain a more in-depth understanding of noncoding regulatory variants.

Keywords: GWAS; enhancer; functional assay; machine learning; noncoding variant; rare-variant association test.