Title
Erosion of Conserved Binding Sites in Personal Genomes Points to Medical Histories.
Abstract
Although many human diseases have a genetic component involving many loci, the majority of studies are statistically underpowered to isolate the many contributing variants, raising the question of the existence of alternate processes to identify disease mutations. To address this question, we collect ancestral transcription factor binding sites disrupted by an individual's variants and then look for their most significant congregation next to a group of functionally related genes. Strikingly, when the method is applied to five different full human genomes, the top enriched function for each is invariably reflective of their very different medical histories. For example, our method implicates "abnormal cardiac output" for a patient with a longstanding family history of heart disease, "decreased circulating sodium level" for an individual with hypertension, and other biologically appealing links for medical histories spanning narcolepsy to axonal neuropathy. Our results suggest that erosion of gene regulation by mutation load significantly contributes to observed heritable phenotypes that manifest in the medical history. The test we developed exposes a hitherto hidden layer of personal variants that promise to shed new light on human disease penetrance, expressivity and the sensitivity with which we can detect them.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004711
PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY
Field
DocType
Volume
Disease,Biology,DNA binding site,Genome-wide association study,Genomics,Comparative genomics,Human genome,Bioinformatics,Locus (genetics),Genetics,Penetrance
Journal
12
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
1553-7358
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
8
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Harendra Guturu1352.88
Sandeep Chinchali2605.60
Shoa L. Clarke300.34
Gill Bejerano455163.30