Back

Structural variants in human congenital heart disease disrupt distal genomic regulatory contacts of developmental genes

Lee, J.; Wu, J.; Pittman, M.; Grant, Z.; Kuang, S.; Quait, D.; Morton, S.; Fudenberg, G.; Traglia, M.; Hayes, K.; Pediatric Cardiac Genomics Consortium, ; Kumar, R.; Bruneau, B.; Pollard, K. S.

2026-03-02 genomics
10.64898/2026.02.28.708767 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Predicting the functional significance of structural variants (SVs) associated with genetic diseases remains challenging. To test the hypothesis that SVs from people with congenital heart disease (CHD) disrupt developmental chromatin interactions, we developed CardioAkita, a machine-learning model that predicts how variants alter 3D chromatin structure. Analyzing previously genotyped de novo SVs (dnSVs), we observed a positive association between CHD severity and CardioAkita scores across dozens of families. From whole-genome sequencing of three individuals with CHD we predicted disruptive dnSVs. Induced pluripotent stem cells engineered to harbor these variants confirmed CardioAkitas predictions of 3D chromatin changes, and further revealed aberrant expression of local genes including cardiac developmental genes, suggesting that chromatin reorganization plays a significant mechanistic role in the genetic etiology of CHD. Our findings highlight the potential for models of 3D chromatin organization to predict the pathogenicity and underlying mechanisms of SVs in human disease.

Matching journals

The top 3 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.