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Unravelling genetic architecture of circulatory amino acid levels, and their effect on risk of complex disorders

Abar, Leila; Zuber, Verena; Otto, Georg W; Tzoulaki, Ioanna; Dehghan, Abbas; (2024) Unravelling genetic architecture of circulatory amino acid levels, and their effect on risk of complex disorders. NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics , 6 (2) , Article lqae046. 10.1093/nargab/lqae046. Green open access

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Abstract

Variations in serum amino acid levels are linked to a multitude of complex disorders. We report the largest genome-wide association study (GWAS) on nine serum amino acids in the UK Biobank participants (117 944, European descent). We identified 34 genomic loci for circulatory levels of alanine, 48 loci for glutamine, 44 loci for glycine, 16 loci for histidine, 11 loci for isoleucine, 19 loci for leucine, 9 loci for phenylalanine, 32 loci for tyrosine and 20 loci for valine. Our gene-based analysis mapped 46-293 genes associated with serum amino acids, including MIP, GLS2, SLC gene family, GCKR, LMO1, CPS1 and COBLL1.The gene-property analysis across 30 tissues highlighted enriched expression of the identified genes in liver tissues for all studied amino acids, except for isoleucine and valine, in muscle tissues for serum alanine and glycine, in adrenal gland tissues for serum isoleucine and leucine, and in pancreatic tissues for serum phenylalanine. Mendelian randomization (MR) phenome-wide association study analysis and subsequent two-sample MR analysis provided evidence that every standard deviation increase in valine is associated with 35% higher risk of type 2 diabetes and elevated levels of serum alanine and branched-chain amino acids with higher levels of total cholesterol, triglyceride and low-density lipoprotein, and lower levels of high-density lipoprotein. In contrast to reports by observational studies, MR analysis did not support a causal association between studied amino acids and coronary artery disease, Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer or prostate cancer. In conclusion, we explored the genetic architecture of serum amino acids and provided evidence supporting a causal role of amino acids in cardiometabolic health.

Type: Article
Title: Unravelling genetic architecture of circulatory amino acid levels, and their effect on risk of complex disorders
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1093/nargab/lqae046
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1093/nargab/lqae046
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: Science & Technology, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Genetics & Heredity, Mathematical & Computational Biology, MENDELIAN RANDOMIZATION, ALZHEIMERS-DISEASE, INSTRUMENTS, METABOLISM, SLC, METAANALYSIS, ASSOCIATION, HISTIDINE, PROFILES, HEALTH
UCL classification: UCL
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10210933
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