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Blood Pressure

Low frequency and rare variants of RBFOX1 are associated with blood pressure

Authors
K.Y. He, X. Li, B.E. Cade, J. Liang, H. Wang, X. Lin, S. Redline, X. Zhu, NHLBI TOPMed BP Working Group
Name and Date of Professional Meeting
ASHG 2017 annual meeting
Associated paper proposal(s)
Working Group(s)
Abstract Text
Our previous combined linkage and association analysis of exome array data in the Cleveland Family Study (CFS) and four cohorts with unrelated individuals (N = 57,234) identified rare, functional variants in RBFOX1, an evolutionarily conserved RNA-binding protein that regulates tissue-specific alternative splicing, to be associated with SBP and PP. In the present study, 487 European Americans (EA) and 507 African Americans (AA) from CFS have been whole-genome sequenced (WGS) as a part of the NHLBI Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) Program. We divided the low frequency and rare variants (defined as minor allele frequency < 5%) of RBFOX1 into three groups: 1) functional coding variants that lead to an amino acid change, 2) synonymous variants, and 3) non-coding variants. The WGS identified 6 variants in group 1, 4 variants in group 2, and 163 variants in group 3 among CFS European Americans; and 12, 4, 269 variants in CFS African Americans, respectively. Using group 1 variants, gene-based analysis using linkage information verified our previous results that rare, coding variants in RBFOX1 are associated with SBP (p-value = 0.00332), DBP (p-value = 0.0267), and PP (p-value = 0.0399) in CFS European Americans. WGS enabled us to identify 3 additional variants in EA that were previously not found in exome array. In African Americans, we detected novel association at the gene-level using functional coding variants (SBP p-value = 0.097; DBP p-value = 0.00663). However, the rare variants associated with BP traits in the two populations are mostly population-specific in this gene, suggesting that rare variant replication at a gene-level is more feasible and necessary than at a variant-level. Replication analysis of RBFOX1 low frequency and rare variants in other TOPMed cohorts are currently underway.
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