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Integrative genetic analysis suggests that skin color modifies the genetic architecture of melanoma.

PloS one | 2017

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer and presents a significant health care burden in many countries. In addition to ultraviolet radiation in sunlight, the main causal factor for melanoma, genetic factors also play an important role in melanoma susceptibility. Although genome-wide association studies have identified many single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with melanoma, little is known about the proportion of disease risk attributable to these loci and their distribution throughout the genome. Here, we investigated the genetic architecture of melanoma in 1,888 cases and 990 controls of European non-Hispanic ancestry. We estimated the overall narrow-sense heritability of melanoma to be 0.18 (P < 0.03), indicating that genetics contributes significantly to the risk of sporadically-occurring melanoma. We then demonstrated that only a small proportion of this risk is attributable to known risk variants, suggesting that much remains unknown of the role of genetics in melanoma. To investigate further the genetic architecture of melanoma, we partitioned the heritability by chromosome, minor allele frequency, and functional annotations. We showed that common genetic variation contributes significantly to melanoma risk, with a risk model defined by a handful of genomic regions rather than many risk loci distributed throughout the genome. We also demonstrated that variants affecting gene expression in skin account for a significant proportion of the heritability, and are enriched among melanoma risk loci. Finally, by incorporating skin color into our analyses, we observed both a shift in significance for melanoma-associated loci and an enrichment of expression quantitative trait loci among melanoma susceptibility variants. These findings suggest that skin color may be an important modifier of melanoma risk. We speculate that incorporating skin color and other non-genetic factors into genetic studies may allow for an improved understanding of melanoma susceptibility and guide future investigations to identify melanoma risk genes.

Pubmed ID: 28973033 RIS Download

Associated grants

None

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


GWAS: Catalog of Published Genome-Wide Association Studies (tool)

RRID:SCR_012745

Catalog of published genome-wide association studies. Genome-wide set of genetic variants in different individuals to see if any variant is associated with trait and disease. Database of genome-wide association study (GWAS) publications including only those attempting to assay single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Publications are organized from most to least recent date of publication. Studies are identified through weekly PubMed literature searches, daily NIH-distributed compilations of news and media reports, and occasional comparisons with an existing database of GWAS literature (HuGE Navigator). Works with HANCESTRO ancestry representation.

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International HapMap Project (tool)

RRID:SCR_002846

THIS RESOURCE IS NO LONGER IN SERVICE, documented August 22, 2016. A multi-country collaboration among scientists and funding agencies to develop a public resource where genetic similarities and differences in human beings are identified and catalogued. Using this information, researchers will be able to find genes that affect health, disease, and individual responses to medications and environmental factors. All of the information generated by the Project will be released into the public domain. Their goal is to compare the genetic sequences of different individuals to identify chromosomal regions where genetic variants are shared. Public and private organizations in six countries are participating in the International HapMap Project. Data generated by the Project can be downloaded with minimal constraints. HapMap project related data, software, and documentation include: bulk data on genotypes, frequencies, LD data, phasing data, allocated SNPs, recombination rates and hotspots, SNP assays, Perlegen amplicons, raw data, inferred genotypes, and mitochondrial and chrY haplogroups; Generic Genome Browser software; protocols and information on assay design, genotyping and other protocols used in the project; and documentation of samples/individuals and the XML format used in the project.

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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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GTOOL (tool)

RRID:SCR_009215

Software application for transforming sets of genotype data for use with the programs SNPTEST and IMPUTE. (entry from Genetic Analysis Software)

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IMPUTE2 (tool)

RRID:SCR_013055

A computer program for phasing observed genotypes and imputing missing genotypes.

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ANNOVAR (tool)

RRID:SCR_012821

An efficient software tool to utilize update-to-date information to functionally annotate genetic variants detected from diverse genomes (including human genome hg18, hg19, as well as mouse, worm, fly, yeast and many others). Given a list of variants with chromosome, start position, end position, reference nucleotide and observed nucleotides, ANNOVAR can perform: 1. gene-based annotation. 2. region-based annotation. 3. filter-based annotation. 4. other functionalities. (entry from Genetic Analysis Software)

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liftOver (tool)

RRID:SCR_018160

Web tool to convert genome coordinates and genome annotation files between assemblies. Used to translate genomic coordinates from one assembly version into another and retrieves putative orthologous regions in other species using UCSC chained and netted alignments.

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