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Hereditas(Beijing) ›› 2020, Vol. 42 ›› Issue (9): 889-897.doi: 10.16288/j.yczz.20-098

• Research Article • Previous Articles     Next Articles

The osteoporosis susceptible SNP rs4325274 remotely regulates the SOX6 gene through enhancers

Xiaomei Tuo1, Dongli Zhu1,2, Xiaofeng Chen1, Yu Rong1, Yan Guo1, Tielin Yang1,2()   

  1. 1. Biomedical Informatics & Genomics Center, Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049;
    2. Research Institute of Zhejiang Xi'an Jiaotong University, Hangzhou 311215
  • Received:2020-05-26 Revised:2020-09-04 Online:2020-09-20 Published:2020-09-07
  • Contact: Yang Tielin E-mail:yangtielin@xjtu.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China No(31771399);Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China No(31970569);China PostdoctoralScience Foundation No(2019M650261);Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China No(2020JQ-026);the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China No(GF18C060003)

Abstract:

Osteoporosis is a typical polygenic disease, and its heritability is as high as 85%. The incidence of osteoporosis has jumped to the fifth among the common diseases. Although a large number of osteoporosis-susceptible SNPs have been identified, most of them are in the non-coding regions of the genome and the functional mechanisms are unknown. The purpose of this study was to explore the function of non-coding osteoporosis-susceptible SNP rs4325274 and dissect the molecular regulatory mechanisms through integrating bioinformatics analysis and functional experiments. Firstly, we found the SNP rs4325274 resided in a putative enhancer element through functional annotation. eQTL and Hi-C analysis found that the SOX6 gene might be a potential distal target of rs4325274. We conducted the motif prediction using multiple databases and verified the result using ChIP-seq data from GEO database. The result showed that the transcription factor HNF1A could preferentially bind to SNP rs4325274-G allele. We further demonstrated that SNP rs4325274 acted as an enhancer regulating SOX6 gene expression by using dual-luciferase reporter assays. Knockdown of HNF1A decreased the SOX6 gene expression. Taken together, our results uncovered a new mechanism of a non-coding functional SNP rs4325274 as a distal enhancer to modulate SOX6 expression, which provides new insights into deciphering molecular regulatory mechanisms underlying non-coding susceptibility SNPs on complex diseases.

Key words: SNP rs4325274, SOX6 gene, transcription factor, mechanism of osteoporosis