Faculty Collaboration Database

Whole-exome imputation of sequence variants identified two novel alleles associated with adult body height in African Americans. Hum Mol Genet 2014 Dec 15;23(24):6607-15

Date

07/17/2014

Pubmed ID

25027330

Pubmed Central ID

PMC4240196

DOI

10.1093/hmg/ddu361

Scopus ID

2-s2.0-84924888532 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site)   14 Citations

Abstract

Adult body height is a quantitative trait for which genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous loci, primarily in European populations. These loci, comprising common variants, explain <10% of the phenotypic variance in height. We searched for novel associations between height and common (minor allele frequency, MAF ≥5%) or infrequent (0.5% < MAF < 5%) variants across the exome in African Americans. Using a reference panel of 1692 African Americans and 471 Europeans from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's (NHLBI) Exome Sequencing Project (ESP), we imputed whole-exome sequence data into 13 719 African Americans with existing array-based GWAS data (discovery). Variants achieving a height-association threshold of P < 5E-06 in the imputed dataset were followed up in an independent sample of 1989 African Americans with whole-exome sequence data (replication). We used P < 2.5E-07 (=0.05/196 779 variants) to define statistically significant associations in meta-analyses combining the discovery and replication sets (N = 15 708). We discovered and replicated three independent loci for association: 5p13.3/C5orf22/rs17410035 (MAF = 0.10, β = 0.64 cm, P = 8.3E-08), 13q14.2/SPRYD7/rs114089985 (MAF = 0.03, β = 1.46 cm, P = 4.8E-10) and 17q23.3/GH2/rs2006123 (MAF = 0.30; β = 0.47 cm; P = 4.7E-09). Conditional analyses suggested 5p13.3 (C5orf22/rs17410035) and 13q14.2 (SPRYD7/rs114089985) may harbor novel height alleles independent of previous GWAS-identified variants (r(2) with GWAS loci <0.01); whereas 17q23.3/GH2/rs2006123 was correlated with GWAS-identified variants in European and African populations. Notably, 13q14.2/rs114089985 is infrequent in African Americans (MAF = 3%), extremely rare in European Americans (MAF = 0.03%), and monomorphic in Asian populations, suggesting it may be an African-American-specific height allele. Our findings demonstrate that whole-exome imputation of sequence variants can identify low-frequency variants and discover novel variants in non-European populations.

Author List

Du M, Auer PL, Jiao S, Haessler J, Altshuler D, Boerwinkle E, Carlson CS, Carty CL, Chen YD, Curtis K, Franceschini N, Hsu L, Jackson R, Lange LA, Lettre G, Monda KL, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) GO Exome Sequencing Project, Nickerson DA, Reiner AP, Rich SS, Rosse SA, Rotter JI, Willer CJ, Wilson JG, North K, Kooperberg C, Heard-Costa N, Peters U

Author

Paul L. Auer PhD Professor in the Institute for Health and Equity department at Medical College of Wisconsin

MESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold

Adult
Aged
Alleles
Body Height
Chromosomes, Human, Pair 13
Chromosomes, Human, Pair 17
Chromosomes, Human, Pair 5
Exome
Female
Gene Frequency
Genetic Loci
Genome-Wide Association Study
Humans
Male
Middle Aged
Quantitative Trait, Heritable