3D genomic features across >50 diverse cell types reveal insights into the genomic architecture of childhood obesity

IMPORTANCE: The prevalence of childhood obesity is increasing worldwide, along with the associated common comorbidities of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease in later life. Motivated by evidence for a strong genetic component, our prior genome-wide association study (GWAS) efforts for childhood obesity revealed 19 independent signals for the trait; however, the mechanism of action of these loci remains to be elucidated. OBJECTIVE: To molecularly characterize these childhood obesity loci we sought to determine the underlying causal variants and the corresponding effector genes within diverse cellular contexts. DESIGN: Integrate childhood obesity GWAS summary statistics with our existing 3D genomic datasets for 57 human cell types, consisting of high-resolution promoter-focused Capture-C/Hi-C, ATAC-seq, and RNA-seq, in order to apply stratified LD score regression and calculate the proportion of genome-wide SNP heritability attributable to cell type-specific features. Subsequent chromatin contact-based fine-mapping was carried out for genome-wide significant childhood obesity loci and their linkage disequilibrium proxies to implicate effector genes. RESULTS: Pancreatic alpha cells revealed the most statistically significant enrichment of childhood obesity variants. Subsequent chromatin contact-based fine-mapping yielded the most abundant number of candidate variants and target genes at the BDNF, ADCY3, TMEM18 and FTO loci in skeletal muscle myotubes and the pancreatic beta-cell line, EndoC-BH1. One novel implicated effector gene, ALKAL2 – an inflammation-responsive gene in nerve nociceptors – was observed at the key TMEM18 locus across multiple immune cell types. Interestingly, this observation was also supported through colocalization analysis using expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) derived from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) dataset, supporting an inflammatory and neurologic component to the pathogenesis of childhood obesity. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Our comprehensive appraisal of 3D genomic datasets generated in a myriad of different cell types provides genomic insights into pediatric obesity pathogenesis.