Skip to main content
 
Notice: Users may be experiencing issues with displaying some pages on stanfordhealthcare.org. We are working closely with our technical teams to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.
Stanford Health Care

Genome-wide association study identifies peanut allergy-specific loci and evidence of epigenetic mediation in US children.

Genome-wide association study identifies peanut allergy-specific loci and evidence of epigenetic mediation in US children. Nature communications Hong, X., Hao, K., Ladd-Acosta, C., Hansen, K. D., Tsai, H., Liu, X., Xu, X., Thornton, T. A., Caruso, D., Keet, C. A., Sun, Y., Wang, G., Luo, W., Kumar, R., Fuleihan, R., Singh, A. M., Kim, J. S., Story, R. E., Gupta, R. S., Gao, P., Chen, Z., Walker, S. O., Bartell, T. R., Beaty, T. H., Fallin, M. D., Schleimer, R., Holt, P. G., Nadeau, K. C., Wood, R. A., Pongracic, J. A., Weeks, D. E., Wang, X. 2015; 6: 6304-?

Abstract

Food allergy (FA) affects 2%-10% of US children and is a growing clinical and public health problem. Here we conduct the first genome-wide association study of well-defined FA, including specific subtypes (peanut, milk and egg) in 2,759 US participants (1,315 children and 1,444 parents) from the Chicago Food Allergy Study, and identify peanut allergy (PA)-specific loci in the HLA-DR and -DQ gene region at 6p21.32, tagged by rs7192 (P=5.5 × 10(-8)) and rs9275596 (P=6.8 × 10(-10)), in 2,197 participants of European ancestry. We replicate these associations in an independent sample of European ancestry. These associations are further supported by meta-analyses across the discovery and replication samples. Both single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are associated with differential DNA methylation levels at multiple CpG sites (P<5 × 10(-8)), and differential DNA methylation of the HLA-DQB1 and HLA-DRB1 genes partially mediate the identified SNP-PA associations. This study suggests that the HLA-DR and -DQ gene region probably poses significant genetic risk for PA.

View details for DOI 10.1038/ncomms7304

View details for PubMedID 25710614