SummaryLarge-scale collections of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) could serve as powerful model systems for examining how genetic variation affects biology and disease. Here we describe the iPSCORE resource: a collection of systematically derived and characterized iPSC lines from 222 ethnically diverse individuals that allows for both familial and association-based genetic studies. iPSCORE lines are pluripotent with high genomic integrity (no or low numbers of somatic copy-number variants) as determined using high-throughput RNA-sequencing and genotyping arrays, respectively. Using iPSCs from a family of individuals, we show that iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes demonstrate gene expression patterns that cluster by genetic background, and can be used to examine variants associated with physiological and disease phenotypes. The iPSCORE collection contains representative individuals for risk and non-risk alleles for 95% of SNPs associated with human phenotypes through genome-wide association studies. Our study demonstrates the utility of iPSCORE for examining how genetic variants influence molecular and physiological traits in iPSCs and derived cell lines.
Summary In this study, we used whole genome sequencing and gene expression profiling of 215 human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines from different donors to identify genetic variants associated with RNA expression for 5,746 genes. We were able to predict causal variants for these expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) that disrupt transcription factor binding and validated a subset of them experimentally. We also identified copy number variant (CNV) eQTLs, including some that appear to affect gene expression by altering the copy number of intergenic regulatory regions. In addition, we were able to identify effects on gene expression of rare genic CNVs and regulatory single nucleotide variants, and found that reactivation of gene expression on the X chromosome depends on gene chromosomal position. Our work highlights the value of iPSCs for genetic association analyses and provides a unique resource for investigating the genetic regulation of gene expression in pluripotent cells.
While genetic variation at chromatin loops is relevant for human disease, the relationships between contact propensity (the probability that loci at loops physically interact), genetics, and gene regulation are unclear. We quantitatively interrogate these relationships by comparing Hi-C and molecular phenotype data across cell types and haplotypes. While chromatin loops consistently form across different cell types, they have subtle quantitative differences in contact frequency that are associated with larger changes in gene expression and H3K27ac. For the vast majority of loci with quantitative differences in contact frequency across haplotypes, the changes in magnitude are smaller than those across cell types; however, the proportional relationships between contact propensity, gene expression, and H3K27ac are consistent. These findings suggest that subtle changes in contact propensity have a biologically meaningful role in gene regulation and could be a mechanism by which regulatory genetic variants in loop anchors mediate effects on expression.
BackgroundGenotypes generated in next generation sequencing studies contain errors which can significantly impact the power to detect signals in common and rare variant association tests. These genotyping errors are not explicitly filtered by the standard GATK Variant Quality Score Recalibration (VQSR) tool and thus remain a source of errors in whole exome sequencing (WES) projects that follow GATK’s recommended best practices. Therefore, additional data filtering methods are required to effectively remove these errors before performing association analyses with complex phenotypes. Here we empirically derive thresholds for genotype and variant filters that, when used in conjunction with the VQSR tool, achieve higher data quality than when using VQSR alone.ResultsThe detailed filtering strategies improve the concordance of sequenced genotypes with array genotypes from 99.33% to 99.77%; improve the percent of discordant genotypes removed from 10.5% to 69.5%; and improve the Ti/Tv ratio from 2.63 to 2.75. We also demonstrate that managing batch effects by separating samples based on different target capture and sequencing chemistry protocols results in a final data set containing 40.9% more high-quality variants. In addition, imputation is an important component of WES studies and is used to estimate common variant genotypes to generate additional markers for association analyses. As such, we demonstrate filtering methods for imputed data that improve genotype concordance from 79.3% to 99.8% while removing 99.5% of discordant genotypes.ConclusionsThe described filtering methods are advantageous for large population-based WES studies designed to identify common and rare variation associated with complex diseases. Compared to data processed through standard practices, these strategies result in substantially higher quality data for common and rare association analyses.
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