Non-coding genome functions in diabetes.

Abstract

Most of the genetic variation associated with diabetes, through genome-wide association studies, does not reside in protein-coding regions, making the identification of functional variants and their eventual translation to the clinic challenging. In recent years, high-throughput sequencing-based methods have enabled genome-scale high-resolution epigenomic profiling in a variety of human tissues, allowing the exploration of the human genome outside of the well-studied coding regions. These experiments unmasked tens of thousands of regulatory elements across several cell types, including diabetes-relevant tissues, providing new insights into their mechanisms of gene regulation. Regulatory landscapes are highly dynamic and cell-type specific and, being sensitive to DNA sequence variation, can vary with individual genomes. The scientific community is now in place to exploit the regulatory maps of tissues central to diabetes etiology, such as pancreatic progenitors and adult islets. This giant leap forward in the understanding of pancreatic gene regulation is revolutionizing our capacity to discriminate between functional and non-functional non-coding variants, opening opportunities to uncover regulatory links between sequence variation and diabetes susceptibility. In this review, we focus on the non-coding regulatory landscape of the pancreatic endocrine cells and provide an overview of the recent developments in this field.