Epigenetic profiling of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritits (JIA) patients

With H3K27ac chromatin immunoprecipitation we identified a disease-specific, inflammation-associated, (super-)enhancer signature in JIA patient synovial fluid-derived CD4+ memory/effector T cells. This signature consists of unique pathogenesis-associated epigenetic changes which extend beyond general T cell activation-induced alterations, indicating that disease-specific (super-)enhancers contribute to JIA pathogenesis. In addition, our analysis shows that there is a profound enrichment of JIA-related SNPs in (super-)enhancers in JIA patients compared to controls, illustrating the importance of these non-coding regions for disease pathogenesis. Overall design: H3K27ac ChIP-sequencing of CD4+ memory/effector T cells derived from peripheral blood (PB) from healthy controls (HC) and PB or synovial fluid (SF) from JIA patients.