Disease-Associated SNPs From non-Coding Regions in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis Are Located Within or Adjacent to Functional Genomic Elements of Human Neutrophils and CD4+ T Cells

摘要

BackgroundJuvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is considered a complex trait in which the environment interacts with inherited genes to produce a phenotype that shows broad inter-individual variance. A recently completed genome-wide association study (GWAS) identified 24 regions of genetic risk for JIA, for example. However, as is typical for GWAS, most of the regions of genetic risk for JIA (22 of 24) were in non-coding regions of the genome. The studies reported here were undertaken to identify functional elements (other than genes) that might be located within the regions of genetic risk.