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Transcription factor regulation of eQTL activity across individuals and tissues.

PLoS genetics | 2022

Tens of thousands of genetic variants associated with gene expression (cis-eQTLs) have been discovered in the human population. These eQTLs are active in various tissues and contexts, but the molecular mechanisms of eQTL variability are poorly understood, hindering our understanding of genetic regulation across biological contexts. Since many eQTLs are believed to act by altering transcription factor (TF) binding affinity, we hypothesized that analyzing eQTL effect size as a function of TF level may allow discovery of mechanisms of eQTL variability. Using GTEx Consortium eQTL data from 49 tissues, we analyzed the interaction between eQTL effect size and TF level across tissues and across individuals within specific tissues and generated a list of 10,098 TF-eQTL interactions across 2,136 genes that are supported by at least two lines of evidence. These TF-eQTLs were enriched for various TF binding measures, supporting with orthogonal evidence that these eQTLs are regulated by the implicated TFs. We also found that our TF-eQTLs tend to overlap genes with gene-by-environment regulatory effects and to colocalize with GWAS loci, implying that our approach can help to elucidate mechanisms of context-specificity and trait associations. Finally, we highlight an interesting example of IKZF1 TF regulation of an APBB1IP gene eQTL that colocalizes with a GWAS signal for blood cell traits. Together, our findings provide candidate TF mechanisms for a large number of eQTLs and offer a generalizable approach for researchers to discover TF regulators of genetic variant effects in additional QTL datasets.

Pubmed ID: 35100260 RIS Download

Research resources used in this publication

None found

Antibodies used in this publication

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Associated grants

  • Agency: NIGMS NIH HHS, United States
    Id: R01 GM140287
  • Agency: NHGRI NIH HHS, United States
    Id: R01 HG003008
  • Agency: NHGRI NIH HHS, United States
    Id: F31 HG010580
  • Agency: NIMH NIH HHS, United States
    Id: R01 MH106842
  • Agency: NHLBI NIH HHS, United States
    Id: R01 HL142028
  • Agency: NCATS NIH HHS, United States
    Id: UL1 TR002550
  • Agency: NHGRI NIH HHS, United States
    Id: U41 HG009494
  • Agency: NIGMS NIH HHS, United States
    Id: T32 GM008224
  • Agency: NHLBI NIH HHS, United States
    Id: HHSN268201000029C

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


SAMTOOLS (tool)

RRID:SCR_002105

Original SAMTOOLS package has been split into three separate repositories including Samtools, BCFtools and HTSlib. Samtools for manipulating next generation sequencing data used for reading, writing, editing, indexing,viewing nucleotide alignments in SAM,BAM,CRAM format. BCFtools used for reading, writing BCF2,VCF, gVCF files and calling, filtering, summarising SNP and short indel sequence variants. HTSlib used for reading, writing high throughput sequencing data.

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STAR (tool)

RRID:SCR_004463

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RNA-SeQC (tool)

RRID:SCR_005120

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HOCOMOCO (tool)

RRID:SCR_005409

A comprehensive collection of human transcription factor binding sites models. DNA sequences of TF binding regions obtained by both pregenomic and high-throughput methods were collected from existing databases and other public data. The ChIPMunk software was used to construct positional weight matrices. Four motif discovery strategies were tested based on different motif shape priors including flat and periodic priors associated with DNA helix pitch. A quality rating was manually assigned to each model based on known binding preferences. An appropriate TFBS model was selected for each TF, with similar models selected for related TFs. In any case only one model per TF was selected unless there was additional evidence for two distinct binding models or different stable modes of dimerization. All TFBS models and initial binding segments data used for motif discovery were mapped to UniPROT IDs.

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Encode (tool)

RRID:SCR_015482

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RRID:CVCL_0063

Cell line HEK293T is a Transformed cell line with a species of origin Homo sapiens (Human)

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