Investigation of the regulatory hot-spots identified for type 2 diabetes (360G-Wellcome-209106_Z_17_Z)

The complex causal chain between a gene and its effect on susceptibility cannot be unravelled until the casual changes have been localised in the DNA sequence. By exploiting high-resolution population-specific genetic maps, we have recently identified 111 additional disease-susceptibility locations, 93 of which are cosmopolitan (in Europeans and African-Americans) and 18 are European specific. We also refined previously identified T2D signals and showed that many of these are also risk loci in African-Americans. The novelty of our results is two-fold: 1) We obtain a precise location for the implicated functional variant(s) and 2) We were able to identify that the majority of the disease locations appear to confer risk of T2D by acting as expression quantitative trail loci (eQTL) that regulate adipose expression levels of a large number of cis-regulated genes. Our aim is to further characterise in detail all the 111 novel and previously found loci by effectively integrating all our causal location estimates together with cell-specific regulatory annotation and chromatin modifications. In addition, we will investigate all our disease and co-localised eQTL locations for tissue specificity (so far we have only used adipose) by performing gene expression analyses in other tissues relevant to T2D.