Genetic control of DNA methylation is largely shared across European and East Asian populations

Alesha Hatton, Fei-Fei Cheng, Tian Lin, Ren-Juan Shen, Jie Chen, Zhili Zheng, Jia Qu, Fan Lyu, Sarah E. Harris, Simon R. Cox, Zi-Bing Jin, Nicholas Martin, Dongsheng Fan, Grant Montgomery, Jian Yang, Naomi Wray, Riccardo E. Marioni, Peter Visscher, Allan Mcrae

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

DNA methylation is an ideal trait to study the extent of the shared genetic control across ancestries, effectively providing hundreds of thousands of model molecular traits with large QTL effect sizes. We investigate cis DNAm QTLs in three European (n = 3701) and two East Asian (n = 2099) cohorts to quantify the similarities and differences in the genetic architecture across populations. We observe 80,394 associated mQTLs (62.2% of DNAm probes with significant mQTL) to be significant in both ancestries, while 28,925 mQTLs (22.4%) are identified in only a single ancestry. mQTL effect sizes are highly conserved across populations, with differences in mQTL discovery likely due to differences in allele frequency of associated variants and differing linkage disequilibrium between causal variants and assayed SNPs. This study highlights the overall similarity of genetic control across ancestries and the value of ancestral diversity in increasing the power to detect associations and enhancing fine mapping resolution.
Original languageEnglish
JournalNature Communications
Volume15
Issue number1
Early online date28 Mar 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • DNA methylation
  • epigenomics
  • genome-wide association studies

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