Human disease-associated genetic variation impacts large intergenic non-coding RNA expression.

• Main Authors: Vinod Kumar, Harm-Jan Westra, Juha Karjalainen, Daria V Zhernakova, Tõnu Esko, Barbara Hrdlickova, Rodrigo Almeida, Alexandra Zhernakova, Eva Reinmaa, Urmo Võsa, Marten H Hofker, Rudolf S N Fehrmann, Jingyuan Fu, Sebo Withoff, Andres Metspalu, Lude Franke, Cisca Wijmenga
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2013-01-01
• Series: PLoS Genetics
• Online Access: http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC3547830?pdf=render
• ISSN: 1553-7390; 1553-7404

Recently it has become clear that only a small percentage (7%) of disease-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are located in protein-coding regions, while the remaining 93% are located in gene regulatory regions or in intergenic regions. Thus, the understanding of how genetic variations control the expression of non-coding RNAs (in a tissue-dependent manner) has far-reaching implications. We tested the association of SNPs with expression levels (eQTLs) of large intergenic non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs), using genome-wide gene expression and genotype data from five different tissues. We identified 112 cis-regulated lincRNAs, of which 45% could be replicated in an independent dataset. We observed that 75% of the SNPs affecting lincRNA expression (lincRNA cis-eQTLs) were specific to lincRNA alone and did not affect the expression of neighboring protein-coding genes. We show that this specific genotype-lincRNA expression correlation is tissue-dependent and that many of these lincRNA cis-eQTL SNPs are also associated with complex traits and diseases.