A global overview of single-cell type selectivity and pleiotropy in complex diseases and traits

Abstract

After centuries of genetic studies, one of the most fundamental questions, i.e. in what cell types do DNA mutations regulate a phenotype, remains unanswered for most complex phenotypes. The current availability of hundreds of genome-wide association studies (GWASs) and single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) of millions of cells provides a unique opportunity to address the question. In the present study, we firstly constructed an association landscape between over 20,000 single cell clusters and 997 complex phenotypes by a cross annotation framework with scRNA-seq expression profiles and GWAS summary statistics. We then performed an extensive overview of cell-type specificity and pleiotropy in human phenotypes and found most phenotypes (>90%) were moderately selectively associated with a limited number of cell types while a small fraction cell types (<10%) had strong pleiotropy in multiple phenotypes (~100). Moreover, we identified three cell type-phenotype mutual pleiotropy blocks in the landscape. The application of the single cell type-phenotype cross annotation framework (named SPA) also explained the T cell biased lymphopenia and suggested important supporting genes in severe COVID-19 from human genetics angle. All the cell type-phenotype association results can be queried and visualized at http://pmglab.top/spa.