Genetic association studies have identified 215 risk loci for inflammatory bowel disease 1–8, which have revealed fundamental aspects of its molecular biology. We performed a genome-wide association study of 25,305 individuals, and meta-analyzed with published summary statistics, yielding a total sample size of 59,957 subjects. We identified 25 new loci, three of which contain integrin genes that encode proteins in pathways identified as important therapeutic targets in inflammatory bowel disease. The associated variants are correlated with expression changes in response to immune stimulus at two of these genes (ITGA4, ITGB8) and at previously implicated loci (ITGAL, ICAM1). In all four cases, the expression increasing allele also increases disease risk. We also identified likely causal missense variants in the primary immune deficiency gene PLCG2 and a negative regulator of inflammation, SLAMF8. Our results demonstrate that new common variant associations continue to identify genes relevant to therapeutic target identification and prioritization.

Genetic association studies have identified 215 risk loci for inflammatory bowel disease 1-8, which have revealed fundamental aspects of its molecular biology. We performed a genome-wide association study of 25,305 individuals, and meta-analyzed with published summary statistics, yielding a total sample size of 59,957 subjects. We identified 25 new loci, three of which contain integrin genes that encode proteins in pathways identified as important therapeutic targets in inflammatory bowel disease. The associated variants are correlated with expression changes in response to immune stimulus at two of these genes (ITGA4, ITGB8) and at previously implicated loci (ITGAL, ICAM1). In all four cases, the expression increasing allele also increases disease risk. We also identified likely causal missense variants in the primary immune deficiency gene PLCG2 and a negative regulator of inflammation, SLAMF8. Our results demonstrate that new common variant associations continue to identify genes relevant to therapeutic target identification and prioritization. Europe PMC Funders Author Manuscripts Europe PMC Funders Author ManuscriptsInflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic, debilitating, disorder of the gastrointestinal tract that includes two common disease subtypes, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Disease pathogenesis is poorly understood but is likely driven by a dysregulated immune response to unknown environmental triggers in genetically susceptible individuals. Treatment regimes often use potent immunomodulators to achieve and maintain remission of symptoms. However, patients commonly experience side effects, lose response to treatment, or develop complications of IBD, with many ultimately requiring major abdominal surgery. Previous genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and targeted follow-up using the Immunochip have been very successful at identifying genetic risk loci for IBD, but increased biological understanding has not yet had a significant impact on therapy for these disorders.In order to further expand our understanding of the biology of these disorders we carried out a GWAS of 12,160 IBD cases and 13,145 population controls of European ancestry that had not been included in any genome-wide meta-analysis of IBD to date (Supplementary Table 1, Online Methods). We imputed genotypes using a reference panel comprising whole genome sequences from 4,686 IBD cases9 and 6,285 publically available population controls10,11. Following quality control (Online Methods) we tested 9.7 million sites for association. At the 232 IBD associated SNPs in the latest meta-analysis by the International IBD Genetics Consortium1, 228 had effects in the same direction in our data, 188 showed at least nominal evidence of replication (P<0.05) and none showed significant evidence of heterogeneity of effect by Cochrane's Q test. Among these replicated loci was a genomewide significant association on chromosome 10q25 that was only previously significantly associated with Crohn's disease in individuals of East Asian a...

To further resolve the genetic architecture of the inflammatory bowel diseases, ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, we sequenced the whole genomes of 4,280 patients at low coverage, and compared them to 3,652 previously sequenced population controls across 73.5 million variants. We then imputed from these sequences into new and existing GWAS cohorts, and tested for association at ~12 million variants in a total of 16,432 cases and 18,843 controls. We discovered a 0.6% frequency missense variant in ADCY7 that doubles risk of ulcerative colitis. Despite good statistical power, we did not identify any other new low-frequency risk variants, and found that such variants explained little heritability. We detected a burden of very rare, damaging missense variants in known Crohn’s disease risk genes, suggesting that more comprehensive sequencing studies will continue to improve our understanding of the biology of complex diseases.

The major inflammatory bowel diseases, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, are both debilitating disorders of the gastrointestinal tract, characterized by a dysregulated immune response to unknown environmental triggers. Both disorders have an important and overlapping genetic component, and much progress has been made in the last 20 years at elucidating some of the specific factors contributing to disease pathogenesis. Here we review our growing understanding of the immunogenetics of inflammatory bowel disease, from the twin studies that first implicated a role for the genome in disease susceptibility to the latest genome-wide association studies that have identified hundreds of associated loci. We consider the insight this offers into the biological mechanisms of the inflammatory bowel diseases, such as autophagy, barrier defence and T-cell differentiation signalling. We reflect on these findings in the context of other immune-related disorders, both common and rare. These observations include links both obvious, such as to pediatric colitis, and more surprising, such as to leprosy. As a changing picture of the underlying genetic architecture emerges, we turn to future directions for the study of complex human diseases such as these, including the use of next generation sequencing technologies for the identification of rarer risk alleles, and potential approaches for narrowing down associated loci to casual variants. We consider the implications of this work for translation into clinical practice, for example via early therapeutic hypotheses arising from our improved understanding of the biology of inflammatory bowel disease. Finally, we present potential opportunities to better understand environmental risk factors, such as the human microbiota in the context of immunogenetics.

We have optimized the lowest energy structures and calculated interaction energies for the CO(2)-Ar, CO(2)-N(2), CO(2)-CO, CO(2)-H(2)O, and CO(2)-NH(3) dimers with the recently developed explicitly correlated coupled cluster singles doubles and perturbative triples [CCSD(T)]-F12 methods and the associated VXZ-F12 (where X = D,T,Q) basis sets. For a given cardinal number, we find that results obtained with the CCSD(T)-F12 methods are much closer to the CCSD(T) complete basis set limit than the conventional CCSD(T) results. The relatively modest increase in the computational cost between explicit and conventional CCSD(T) is more than compensated for by the impressive accuracy of the CCSD(T)-F12 method. We recommend use of the CCSD(T)-F12 methods in combination with the VXZ-F12 basis sets for the accurate determination of equilibrium geometries and interaction energies of weakly bound electron donor acceptor complexes.