Back

Multi-omics analysis in human retina uncovers ultraconserved cis-regulatory elements at rare eye disease loci

Lopez Soriano, V.; Duenas Rey, A.; Mukherjee, R.; Genomics England Research Consortium, ; Coppieters, F.; Bauwens, M.; Willaert, A.; De Baere, E.

2023-06-12 genetic and genomic medicine
10.1101/2023.06.08.23291052 medRxiv
Show abstract

Cross-species genome comparisons have revealed a substantial number of ultraconserved non-coding elements (UCNEs). Several of these elements have proved to be essential tissue- and cell type-specific cis-regulators of developmental gene expression. Here, we characterized a set of UCNEs as candidate CREs (cCREs) during retinal development and evaluated the contribution of their genomic variation to rare eye diseases, for which pathogenic non-coding variants are emerging. Integration of bulk and single-cell retinal multi-omics data revealed 594 genes under potential cis-regulatory control of UCNEs, of which 45 are implicated in rare eye disease. Mining of candidate cis-regulatory UCNEs in WGS data derived from the rare eye disease cohort of Genomics England revealed 178 ultrarare variants within 84 UCNEs associated with 29 disease genes. Overall, we provide a comprehensive annotation of ultraconserved non-coding regions acting as cCREs during retinal development which can be targets of non-coding variation underlying rare eye diseases.

Matching journals

The top 9 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.