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Identification of a novel locus associated with skin colour in African-admixed populations.

Scientific reports | 2017

Skin pigmentation is a complex trait that varies largely among populations. Most genome-wide association studies of this trait have been performed in Europeans and Asians. We aimed to uncover genes influencing skin colour in African-admixed individuals. We performed a genome-wide association study of melanin levels in 285 Hispanic/Latino individuals from Puerto Rico, analyzing 14 million genetic variants. A total of 82 variants with p-value ≤1 × 10-5 were followed up in 373 African Americans. Fourteen single nucleotide polymorphisms were replicated, of which nine were associated with skin colour at genome-wide significance in a meta-analysis across the two studies. These results validated the association of two previously known skin pigmentation genes, SLC24A5 (minimum p = 2.62 × 10-14, rs1426654) and SLC45A2 (minimum p = 9.71 × 10-10, rs16891982), and revealed the intergenic region of BEND7 and PRPF18 as a novel locus associated with this trait (minimum p = 4.58 × 10-9, rs6602666). The most significant variant within this region is common among African-descent populations but not among Europeans or Native Americans. Our findings support the advantages of analyzing African-admixed populations to discover new genes influencing skin pigmentation.

Pubmed ID: 28300201 RIS Download

Research resources used in this publication

None found

Antibodies used in this publication

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Associated grants

  • Agency: NIEHS NIH HHS, United States
    Id: R01 ES015794
  • Agency: NIGMS NIH HHS, United States
    Id: K12 GM081266
  • Agency: NHLBI NIH HHS, United States
    Id: R01 HL117004
  • Agency: NIMHD NIH HHS, United States
    Id: P60 MD006902
  • Agency: NIEHS NIH HHS, United States
    Id: R21 ES024844
  • Agency: NIMHD NIH HHS, United States
    Id: R01 MD010443
  • Agency: NHLBI NIH HHS, United States
    Id: R01 HL128439

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This is a list of tools and resources that we have found mentioned in this publication.


ADMIXTURE (tool)

RRID:SCR_001263

A software tool for maximum likelihood estimation of individual ancestries from multilocus SNP genotype datasets. It uses the same statistical model as STRUCTURE but calculates estimates much more rapidly using a fast numerical optimization algorithm. It uses a block relaxation approach to alternately update allele frequency and ancestry fraction parameters. Each block update is handled by solving a large number of independent convex optimization problems, which are tackled using a fast sequential quadratic programming algorithm. Convergence of the algorithm is accelerated using a novel quasi-Newton acceleration method.

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PLINK (tool)

RRID:SCR_001757

Open source whole genome association analysis toolset, designed to perform range of basic, large scale analyses in computationally efficient manner. Used for analysis of genotype/phenotype data. Through integration with gPLINK and Haploview, there is some support for subsequent visualization, annotation and storage of results. PLINK 1.9 is improved and second generation of the software.

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Eigensoft (tool)

RRID:SCR_004965

EIGENSOFT package combines functionality from our population genetics methods (Patterson et al. 2006) and our EIGENSTRAT stratification method (Price et al. 2006). The EIGENSTRAT method uses principal components analysis to explicitly model ancestry differences between cases and controls along continuous axes of variation; the resulting correction is specific to a candidate marker''s variation in frequency across ancestral populations, minimizing spurious associations while maximizing power to detect true associations. The EIGENSOFT package has a built-in plotting script and supports multiple file formats and quantitative phenotypes. Source code, documentation and executables for using EIGENSOFT 3.0 on a Linux platform can be downloaded. New features of EIGENSOFT 3.0 include supporting either 32-bit or 64-bit Linux machines, a utility to merge different data sets, a utility to identify related samples (accounting for population structure), and supporting multiple file formats for EIGENSTRAT stratification correction.

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1000 Genomes Project and AWS (tool)

RRID:SCR_008801

A dataset containing the full genomic sequence of 1,700 individuals, freely available for research use. The 1000 Genomes Project is an international research effort coordinated by a consortium of 75 companies and organizations to establish the most detailed catalogue of human genetic variation. The project has grown to 200 terabytes of genomic data including DNA sequenced from more than 1,700 individuals that researchers can now access on AWS for use in disease research free of charge. The dataset containing the full genomic sequence of 1,700 individuals is now available to all via Amazon S3. The data can be found at: http://s3.amazonaws.com/1000genomes The 1000 Genomes Project aims to include the genomes of more than 2,662 individuals from 26 populations around the world, and the NIH will continue to add the remaining genome samples to the data collection this year. Public Data Sets on AWS provide a centralized repository of public data hosted on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The data can be seamlessly accessed from AWS services such Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), which provide organizations with the highly scalable compute resources needed to take advantage of these large data collections. AWS is storing the public data sets at no charge to the community. Researchers pay only for the additional AWS resources they need for further processing or analysis of the data. All 200 TB of the latest 1000 Genomes Project data is available in a publicly available Amazon S3 bucket. You can access the data via simple HTTP requests, or take advantage of the AWS SDKs in languages such as Ruby, Java, Python, .NET and PHP. Researchers can use the Amazon EC2 utility computing service to dive into this data without the usual capital investment required to work with data at this scale. AWS also provides a number of orchestration and automation services to help teams make their research available to others to remix and reuse. Making the data available via a bucket in Amazon S3 also means that customers can crunch the information using Hadoop via Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and take advantage of the growing collection of tools for running bioinformatics job flows, such as CloudBurst and Crossbow.

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SAGE (tool)

RRID:SCR_009302

Software application that provides researchers with the tools necessary for various types of statistical genetic analysis of human family data. (entry from Genetic Analysis Software)

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