Massive sequencing study links rare DNA alterations to type 2 diabetes

June 5, 2019

An international consortium of scientists has analyzed protein-coding genes from nearly 46,000 people, linking rare DNA alterations to type 2 diabetes. The study, one of the largest known of its type, includes data from people of European, African American, Hispanic/Latino, East Asian, and South Asian ancestries.

From this large cohort—roughly 21,000 individuals with type 2 diabetes and 25,000 healthy controls—the researchers identified four genes with rare variants that affect diabetes risk. The data suggests that hundreds more genes will likely be identified in the future.

These genes and the proteins they encode are potential targets for new medicines and may guide researchers to better understand and treat disease.

All of the team’s results are publicly available online through the Type 2 Diabetes Knowledge Portal, enabling scientists around the world to access and use the information for their own research.

“These results demonstrate the importance of studying large samples of individuals from a wide range of ancestries,” said senior study author Michael Boehnke, professor of biostatistics and director of the Center for Statistical Genetics at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Most large population studies focus on individuals of European ancestry, and that can make it hard to generalize the results globally. The more diverse the cohort makes for better, more informative science.”

The study was published in Nature.

For this study, the researchers sequenced what’s called the “exome,” that is, only those regions in the genome that code for proteins.

Another approach to finding disease-associated variants is called a genome wide association study, or GWAS. This approach can be very effective for finding common-disease variants throughout the entire genome but can miss the less-common exome variants. And this is key, because while rare exome variants are extremely hard to detect, they can provide invaluable insight into disease-related genes, which in turn can suggest new drug targets.

For this reason, the researchers aim to increase sample sizes in future studies. With a cohort of almost 50,000, this may be the largest exome sequencing study of type 2 diabetes, but as the authors state in the paper, sample sizes ranging between 75,000 and 185,000 cases may be needed to identify even those rare variants with the largest impact.

University of Michigan has the full article