Thousands of genetic variants acting in multiple cell types underlie complex disorders, yet most gene expression studies profile only bulk tissues, making it hard to resolve where genetic and non-genetic contributors act. This is particularly important for psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders that impact multiple brain cell types with highly-distinct gene expression patterns and proportions. To address this challenge, we develop a new framework, SPLITR, that integrates single-nucleus and bulk RNA-seq data, enabling phenotype-aware deconvolution and correcting for systematic discrepancies between bulk and single-cell data. We deconvolved 3,387 post-mortem brain samples across 1,127 individuals and in multiple brain regions. We find that cell proportion varies across brain regions, individuals, disease status, and genotype, including genetic variants in TMEM106B that impact inhibitory neuron fraction and 4,757 cell-type-specific eQTLs. Our results demonstrate the power of jointly analyzing bulk and single-cell RNA-seq to provide insights into cell-type-specific mechanisms for complex brain disorders.

The Tpr protease of Porphyromonas gingivalis W83 is a membrane-associated enzyme capable of hydrolyzing a chromogenic bacterial collagenase substrate. An isogenic mutant lacking a functional tpr gene had a greatly reduced ability to hydrolyze the collagenase substrate. Activity was restored to the tpr mutant by introducing a shuttle plasmid containing the tpr gene. Expression of the gene is induced by nutrient limitation, as shown by enzymatic and Northern analyses.

Characterizing the intermediate phenotypes, such as gene expression, that mediate genetic effects on complex diseases is a fundamental problem in human genetics. Existing methods utilize genotypic data and summary statistics to identify putative disease genes, but cannot distinguish pleiotropy from causal mediation and are limited by overly strong assumptions about the data. To overcome these limitations, we develop Causal Multivariate Mediation within Extended Linkage disequilibrium (CaMMEL), a novel Bayesian inference framework to jointly model multiple mediated and unmediated effects relying only on summary statistics. We show in simulation that CaMMEL accurately distinguishes between mediating and pleiotropic genes unlike existing methods. We applied CaMMEL to Alzheimer's disease (AD) and found 206 causal genes in sub-threshold loci (p < 10 −4 ). We prioritized 21 genes which mediate at least 5% of local genetic variance, disrupting innate immune pathways in AD.