Cross-Species Integration of Transcriptomic Effects of Tobacco and Nicotine Exposure Helps to Prioritize Genetic Effects on Human Tobacco Consumption

Abstract

Computational advances have fostered the development of new methods and tools to integrate gene expression and functional evidence into human-genetic association analyses. Integrative functional genomics analysis for altered response to alcohol in mice provided the first evidence that multi-species analysis tools, such as GeneWeaver, can identify or confirm novel alcohol-related loci. The present study describes an integrative framework to investigate how highly-connected genes linked by their association to tobacco-related behaviors, contribute to individual differences in tobacco consumption. Data from individuals of European ancestry in the UKBiobank (N=139,043) were used to examine the relative contribution of orthologs of a set of genes that are transcriptionally co-regulated by tobacco or nicotine exposure in model organism experiments to human tobacco consumption. Multi-component mixed linear models using genotyped and imputed single nucleotide variants indicated that: (1) variation within human orthologs of these genes accounted for 2-5% of the observed heritability (meta h2SNP-Total=0.08 [95% CI: 0.07, 0.09]) of tobacco/nicotine consumption across three independent folds of unrelated individuals (enrichment ranging from 0.85 - 2.98), and (2) variation around (5, 10, 15, 25, and 50 Kb regions) the set of co-transcriptionally regulated genes accounted for 5-36% of the observed SNP-heritability (enrichment ranging from 1.60 - 31.45). Notably, the effects of variants in co-transcriptionally regulated genes were enriched in tobacco GWAS. These findings highlight the advantages of using multiple species evidence to isolate genetic factors to better understand the etiological complexity of tobacco and other nicotine consumption.