Abstract
The relationship between growth and immune phenotypes has been presented in the context of physiology and energy allocation theory, but has rarely been explained genetically in humans. As more summary statistics of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) become available, it is increasingly possible to explore the genetic relationship between traits at the level of genome-wide summary statistics. In this study, publicly available summary statistics of growth and immune related traits were used to evaluate the genetic correlation coefficients between immune and growth traits, as well as the cause and effect relationship between them. In addition, pleiotropic variants and KEGG pathways were identified. As a result, we found negative correlations between birthweight and immune cell count phenotypes, a positive correlation between childhood head circumference and eosinophil counts (EO), and positive or negative correlations between childhood body mass index and immune phenotypes. Statistically significant negative effects of immune cell count phenotypes on human height, and a slight but significant negative influence of human height on allergic disease were also observed. A total of 98 genomic regions were identified as containing variants potentially related to both immunity and growth. Some variants, such as rs3184504 located in SH2B3, rs13107325 in SLC39A8, and rs1260326 located in GCKR, which have been identified to be pleiotropic SNPs among other traits, were found to also be related to growth and immune traits in this study. Meanwhile, the most frequent overlapping KEGG pathways between growth and immune phenotypes were autoimmune related pathways. Pleiotropic pathways such as the adipocytokine signaling pathway and JAK-STAT signaling pathway were also identified to be significant. The results of this study indicate the complex genetic relationship between growth and immune phenotypes, and reveal the genetic background of their correlation in the context of pleiotropy.
Highlights
Both human growth and immune traits are influenced by inherited genetic variants (Ogata, 2006; Roederer et al, 2015)
We explored the genetic correlation between growth and immune phenotypes using summary statistics of a number of different genome-wide association studies (GWAS)
The identification of several pleiotropic variants, genomic regions, and pathways extend the pleiotropy of some single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and is helpful in our understanding of the genetic background of the relationship between growth and immune traits, and is meaningful for disease diagnosis and drug development
Summary
Both human growth and immune traits are influenced by inherited genetic variants (Ogata, 2006; Roederer et al, 2015). The increasing number of GWAS indicates the existence of underlying overlapping causal variants that play roles in multiple traits, namely pleiotropy (Visscher et al, 2017). The genetic relationships among multiple traits often result from pleiotropy of a gene and linkage disequilibrium (LD) between genes for different traits (Bolormaa et al, 2014). The former is known as biological pleiotropy, whereas the latter is a type of spurious pleiotropy (Solovieff et al, 2013). The genetic relationship between growth and immunity has been primarily studied on model organisms or livestock, and this relationship has often proved to be inverse (Greer, 2008; Clapperton et al, 2009; van der Most et al, 2011)
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