@article{25821,
  keywords = {leprosy, Genome-Wide Association Study, Evaluation, China},
  author = {Liu H and Irwanto A and Fu X and Yu G and Yu Y and Sun Y and Wang C and Wang Z and Okada Y and Low H and Li Y and Liany H and Chen M and Bao F and Li J and You J and Zhang Q and Liu J and Chu T and Andiappan AK and Wang N and Niu G and Liu D and Yu X and Zhang L and Tian H and Zhou G and Rotzschke O and Chen S and Zhang X and Liu J and Zhang F},
  title = {Discovery of six new susceptibility loci and analysis of pleiotropic effects in leprosy.},
  abstract = {<p>Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have led to the discovery of several susceptibility loci for leprosy with robust evidence, providing biological insight into the role of host genetic factors in mycobacterial infection. However, the identified loci only partially explain disease heritability, and additional genetic risk factors remain to be discovered. We performed a 3-stage GWAS of leprosy in the Chinese population using 8,313 cases and 16,017 controls. Besides confirming all previously published loci, we discovered six new susceptibility loci, and further gene prioritization analysis of these loci implicated BATF3, CCDC88B and CIITA-SOCS1 as new susceptibility genes for leprosy. A systematic evaluation of pleiotropic effects demonstrated a high tendency for leprosy susceptibility loci to show association with autoimmunity and inflammatory diseases. Further analysis suggests that molecular sensing of infection might have a similar pathogenic role across these diseases, whereas immune responses have discordant roles in infectious and inflammatory diseases.</p>
},
  year = {2015},
  journal = {Nature genetics},
  issn = {1546-1718},
  doi = {10.1038/ng.3212},
  language = {eng},
}