Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Differentiation Enables Functional Validation of GWAS Variants in Metabolic Disease.

Cell Stem Cell
Authors
Keywords
Abstract

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have highlighted a large number of genetic variants with potential disease association, but functional analysis remains a challenge. Here we describe an approach to functionally validate identified variants through differentiation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to study cellular pathophysiology. We collected peripheral blood cells from Framingham Heart Study participants and reprogrammed them to iPSCs. We then differentiated 68 iPSC lines into hepatocytes and adipocytes to investigate the effect of the 1p13 rs12740374 variant on cardiometabolic disease phenotypes via transcriptomics and metabolomic signatures. We observed a clear association between rs12740374 and lipid accumulation and gene expression in differentiated hepatocytes, in particular, expression of SORT1, CELSR2, and PSRC1, consistent with previous analyses of this variant using other approaches. Initial investigation of additional SNPs also highlighted correlations with gene expression. These findings suggest that iPSC-based population studies hold promise as tools for the functional validation of GWAS variants.

Year of Publication
2017
Journal
Cell Stem Cell
Volume
20
Issue
4
Pages
547-557.e7
Date Published
2017 Apr 06
ISSN
1875-9777
DOI
10.1016/j.stem.2017.01.010
PubMed ID
28388431
Links
Grant list
R01 DK097768 / DK / NIDDK NIH HHS / United States
U01 HL107440 / HL / NHLBI NIH HHS / United States