Natural Killer cells demonstrate distinct eQTL and transcriptome-wide disease associations, highlighting their role in autoimmunity.

Abstract 

Natural Killer (NK) cells are innate lymphocytes with central roles in immunosurveillance and are implicated in autoimmune pathogenesis. The degree to which regulatory variants affect NK gene expression is poorly understood. We performed expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) mapping of negatively selected NK cells from a population of healthy Europeans (n=245). We find a significant subset of genes demonstrate eQTL specific to NK cells and these are highly informative of human disease, in particular autoimmunity. An NK cell transcriptome-wide association study (TWAS) across five common autoimmune diseases identified further novel associations at 27 genes. In addition to these cis observations, we find novel master-regulatory regions impacting expression of trans gene networks at regions including 19q13.4, the Killer cell Immunoglobulin-like Receptor (KIR) Region, GNLY, MC1R and UVSSA. Our findings provide new insights into the unique biology of NK cells, demonstrating markedly different eQTL from other immune cells, with implications for disease mechanisms.

Preprint

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.10.443088v1

Dataset

nk_raw_for_zenodo.txt: Matrix of raw gene expression at 47,209 probes in primary human NK cells from 245 healthy individuals of European ancestry. Gene expression is quantified using the Illumina HumanHT-12 v4 BeadChip gene expression array platform. Column names represent Array Address ID for each probe, and row names represent pseudonymised sample identifiers, which can be matched to sample genotypes. Sample genotypes are available at the European Genome-Phenome Archive with accession ID EGAS00000000109).

probes_passing_QC.txt: List of probes passing quality control; probe sequences mapping to a unique genomic locus, and probe sequences not containing common genomic variation (minor allele frequency >1%), n=29,002. Column names are Array Address ID (probeID), Ensembl ID (ensembl), Gene ID (gene), and Illumina probe ID (ilmn).