Exploring the genetic architecture of inflammatory bowel disease by whole-genome sequencing identifies association at ADCY7

Carl Anderson, Jeffrey Barrett and colleagues use whole-genome sequencing and imputation to explore the genetic architecture of inflammatory bowel disease. They identify a low-frequency missense variant in ADCY7 that doubles risk of ulcerative colitis and detect a burden of very rare, damaging missense variants in known Crohn's disease risk genes. To further resolve the genetic architecture of the inflammatory bowel diseases ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, we sequenced the whole genomes of 4,280 patients at low coverage and compared them to 3,652 previously sequenced population controls across 73.5 million variants. We then imputed from these sequences into new and existing genome-wide association study cohorts and tested for association at ∼12 million variants in a total of 16,432 cases and 18,843 controls. We discovered a 0.6% frequency missense variant in ADCY7 that doubles the risk of ulcerative colitis. Despite good statistical power, we did not identify any other new low-frequency risk variants and found that such variants explained little heritability. We detected a burden of very rare, damaging missense variants in known Crohn's disease risk genes, suggesting that more comprehensive sequencing studies will continue to improve understanding of the biology of complex diseases.