Identification of cis- and trans-regulatory variation modulating microRNA expression levels in human fibroblasts
- Christelle Borel1,
- Samuel Deutsch1,
- Audrey Letourneau,
- Eugenia Migliavacca,
- Stephen B. Montgomery,
- Antigone S. Dimas2,
- Charles E. Vejnar,
- Homa Attar,
- Maryline Gagnebin,
- Corinne Gehrig,
- Emilie Falconnet,
- Yann Dupré,
- Emmanouil T. Dermitzakis and
- Stylianos E. Antonarakis3
- Department of Genetic Medicine and Development, University of Geneva Medical School, Geneva 1211, Switzerland
-
↵1 These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are regulatory noncoding RNAs that affect the production of a significant fraction of human mRNAs via post-transcriptional regulation. Interindividual variation of the miRNA expression levels is likely to influence the expression of miRNA target genes and may therefore contribute to phenotypic differences in humans, including susceptibility to common disorders. The extent to which miRNA levels are genetically controlled is largely unknown. In this report, we assayed the expression levels of miRNAs in primary fibroblasts from 180 European newborns of the GenCord project and performed association analysis to identify eQTLs (expression quantitative traits loci). We detected robust expression for 121 miRNAs out of 365 interrogated. We have identified significant cis- (10%) and trans- (11%) eQTLs. Furthermore, we detected one genomic locus (rs1522653) that influences the expression levels of five miRNAs, thus unraveling a novel mechanism for coregulation of miRNA expression.
Footnotes
-
↵3 Corresponding author.
E-mail stylianos.antonarakis{at}unige.ch.
-
[Supplemental material is available online at http://www.genome.org. The miRNA expression data from this study has been submitted to the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/) under accession no. GSE24610. The genotyping data from this study have been submitted to the EMBL-EBI European Genome-phenome Archive (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ega/) under accession no. EGAS00000000056.]
-
Article published online before print. Article and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.109371.110.
- Received April 20, 2010.
- Accepted November 1, 2010.
- Copyright © 2011 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
