Genome-wide enhancer-gene regulatory maps link causal variants to target genes underlying human colorectal cancer risk [ATAC-seq]

Although GWASs have identified thousands of variants associated with human complex traits, most of which reside in the non-coding regions, especially enhancers, and biological mechanisms remain unclear. To created enhancer-gene maps to determine causal variant of CRC risk, we performed multi-omics analyses of ATAC-seq, H3K27ac ChIP-seq and RNA-seq with high quality from our 10 CRC tissues. By computationally integrating these multi-omics data, we identified 34,130 enhancer-gene connections involving 15,121 unique enhancers and 12,351 expressed genes. We demonstrated an ABC regulatory variant rs4810856 that is significantly associated with an increased CRC risk with large-scale population study and biological experiments. Our study provides regulation maps linking enhancers to genes, providing new insights into colorectal cancer etiology. bulk ATAC-seq was performed on 10 colorectal cancer samples from CRC patients