R01HG012133

Characterizing the Evolutionary Architecture of Complex Disease Within and Across Diverse Populations - Project Summary

The past decade of genome-wide association studies (GWASs) has seen thousands of complex traits and diseases studied and identified thousands of reproducibly associated genetic variants. GWAS has helped characterize the complexity of common genetic architectures and shed light on the role of genetics in disease risk.

A large body of work has demonstrated that risks of complex traits are highly enriched in functional regions of the genome, which indicates that risk is mediated through perturbed regulatory action on relevant susceptibility genes. Similarly, multiple recent works have found that disease risks are shaped by forces of natural selection, which kept the frequencies of deleterious alleles low in the population. Together, the functional mechanisms and their interplay with natural selection can be coupled under a general mechanism referred to as the evolutionary architecture.

Current frameworks to infer the evolutionary architecture for common complex diseases are only applicable to relatively homogenous populations, such as individuals of European ancestry. Several recent works have demonstrated that integrating multi-ethnic GWAS data substantially improves statistical power to identify causal factors underlying complex traits and diseases due to the increased heterogeneity in allele frequencies. However, current approaches to evolutionary architecture are unable to appropriately model the heterogeneity across populations with respect to allele frequencies and linkage disequilibrium. Similarly, the resolution of these methods is currently limited to complex diseases and phenotypes, whose inferred architectures, while informative, fail to describe regulatory network mechanisms that mediate risk.

Methods capable of analyzing many molecular phenotypes simultaneously have the potential to identify shared architectures and pinpoint core genes relevant for disease risk. Lastly, several works have shown that integrating functional information with GWAS substantially improves polygenic risk prediction. Together, these issues and opportunities highlight the need for new computational approaches that can scale to multiple populations and large-scale molecular phenotype catalogues while accounting for underlying heterogeneity and shared signals.

Here, we propose novel approaches to integrate GWAS data from multiple, geographically diverse populations and phenotypes to characterize the population-specific and shared evolutionary architectures. Importantly, our approaches run directly on summary data, which enables immediate large-scale analysis. We propose to apply our novel approaches to large-scale multi-ethnic GWAS data. Together, our work will systematically characterize evolutionary architectures for complex diseases and molecular phenotypes and populations in a robust, open, and reproducible approach.

University Of Southern California

NHGRI SUPPORTS THE DEVELOPMENT OF RESOURCES AND TECHNOLOGIES THAT WILL ACCELERATE GENOME RESEARCH AND ITS APPLICATION TO HUMAN HEALTH AND GENOMIC MEDICINE. A CRITICAL PART OF THE NHGRI MISSION CONTINUES TO BE THE STUDY OF THE ETHICAL, LEGAL AND SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS (ELSI) OF GENOME RESEARCH. NHGRI ALSO SUPPORTS THE TRAINING AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT OF INVESTIGATORS AND THE DISSEMINATION OF GENOME INFORMATION TO THE PUBLIC AND TO HEALTH PROFESSIONALS. THE SMALL BUSINESS INNOVATION RESEARCH (SBIR) PROGRAM IS USED TO INCREASE PRIVATE SECTOR COMMERCIALIZATION OF INNOVATIONS DERIVED FROM FEDERAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, TO INCREASE SMALL BUSINESS PARTICIPATION IN FEDERAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, AND TO FOSTER AND ENCOURAGE PARTICIPATION OF SOCIALLY AND ECONOMICALLY DISADVANTAGED SMALL BUSINESS CONCERNS AND WOMEN-OWNED SMALL BUSINESS CONCERNS IN TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION. THE SMALL BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER (STTR) PROGRAM IS USED TO FOSTER SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION THROUGH COOPERATIVE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CARRIED OUT BETWEEN SMALL BUSINESS CONCERNS AND RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS, TO FOSTER TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER BETWEEN SMALL BUSINESS CONCERNS AND RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS, TO INCREASE PRIVATE SECTOR COMMERCIALIZATION OF INNOVATIONS DERIVED FROM FEDERAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, AND TO FOSTER AND ENCOURAGE PARTICIPATION OF SOCIALLY AND ECONOMICALLY DISADVANTAGED SMALL BUSINESS CONCERNS AND WOMEN-OWNED SMALL BUSINESS CONCERNS IN TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION.

93.172 - Human Genome Research

National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) [HHS - NIH]

Los Angeles, California 90033 United States

Single Zip Code

Investigator Initiated Research in Computational Genomics and Data Science (R01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed) (PAR-18-844)

Amendment Since initial award the total obligations have increased 393% from $725,512 to $3,574,391.