School of Medicine Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-22-2019
Abstract
Protein-coding genetic variants that strongly affect disease risk can yield relevant clues to disease pathogenesis. Here we report exome-sequencing analyses of 20,791 individuals with type 2 diabetes (T2D) and 24,440 non-diabetic control participants from 5 ancestries. We identify gene-level associations of rare variants (with minor allele frequencies of less than 0.5%) in 4 genes at exome-wide significance, including a series of more than 30 SLC30A8 alleles that conveys protection against T2D, and in 12 gene sets, including those corresponding to T2D drug targets (P = 6.1 × 10−3) and candidate genes from knockout mice (P = 5.2 × 10−3). Within our study, the strongest T2D gene-level signals for rare variants explain at most 25% of the heritability of the strongest common single-variant signals, and the gene-level effect sizes of the rare variants that we observed in established T2D drug targets will require 75,000–185,000 sequenced cases to achieve exome-wide significance. We propose a method to interpret these modest rare-variant associations and to incorporate these associations into future target or gene prioritization efforts.
Recommended Citation
Flannick, J., Mercader, J.M., Fuchsberger, C. et al. Exome sequencing of 20,791 cases of type 2 diabetes and 24,440 controls. Nature 570, 71–76 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1231-2
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
Nature
DOI
10.1038/s41586-019-1231-2
Academic Level
faculty
Mentor/PI Department
Office of Human Genetics
Comments
Copyright © 2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited