Interethnic analyses of blood pressure loci in populations of East Asian and European descent

Blood pressure (BP) is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease and more than 200 genetic loci associated with BP are known. Here, we perform a multi-stage genome-wide association study for BP ( max N = 289,038) principally in East Asians and meta-analysis in East Asians and Europeans. We report 19 new genetic loci and ancestry-specific BP variants, conforming to a common ancestry-specific variant association model. At 10 unique loci, distinct non-rare ancestry-specific variants colocalize within the same linkage disequilibrium block despite the significantly discordant effects for the proxy shared variants between the ethnic groups. The genome-wide transethnic correlation of causal-variant effect-sizes is 0.898 and 0.851 for systolic and diastolic BP, respectively. Some of the ancestry-specific association signals are also influenced by a selective sweep. Our results provide new evidence for the role of common ancestry-specific variants and natural selection in ethnic differences in complex traits such as BP.</p

Identification of 64 Novel Genetic Loci Provides an Expanded View on the Genetic Architecture of Coronary Artery Disease

Rationale: Coronary artery disease (CAD) is a complex phenotype driven by genetic and environmental factors. Ninety-seven genetic risk loci have been identified to date, but the identification of additional susceptibility loci might be important to enhance our understanding of the genetic architecture of CAD. Objective: To expand the number of genome-wide significant loci, catalog functional insights, and enhance our understanding of the genetic architecture of CAD. Methods and Results: We performed a genome-wide association study in 34541 CAD cases and 261984 controls of UK Biobank resource followed by replication in 88192 cases and 162544 controls from CARDIoGRAMplusC4D. We identified 75 loci that replicated and were genome-wide significant (P Conclusions: We identified 64 novel genetic risk loci for CAD and performed fine mapping of all 161 risk loci to obtain a credible set of causal variants. The large expansion of reconstituted gene sets argues in favor of an expanded omnigenic model view on the genetic architecture of CAD

ukbpheno v1.0:An R package for phenotyping health-related outcomes in the UK Biobank

The complexity and volume of data associated with population-based cohorts means that generating health-related outcomes can be challenging. Using one such cohort, the UK Biobank—a major open access resource—we present a protocol to efficiently integrate the main dataset and record-level data files, to harmonize and process the data using an R package named “ukbpheno”. We describe how to use the package to generate binary phenotypes in a standardized and machine-actionable manner