Dense fine-mapping study identifies new susceptibility loci for primary biliary cirrhosis

We genotyped 2,861 cases from the UK PBC consortium and 8,514 UK population controls across 196,524 variants within 186 known autoimmune risk loci. We identified three loci newly associated with primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) (with P<5×10(−8)), increasing the number of known susceptibility loci to 25. The most associated variant at 19p12 is a low-frequency non-synonymous SNP in TYK2, further implicating JAK/STAT and cytokine signalling in disease pathogenesis. A further five loci contained non-synonymous variants in high linkage disequilibrium (LD) (r(2)>0.8) with the most associated variant at the locus. We found multiple independent common, low-frequency and rare variant association signals at five loci. Of the 26 independent non-HLA signals tagged on Immunochip, 15 have SNPs in B-lymphoblastoid open-chromatin regions in high LD (r(2)>0.8) with the most associated variant. This study demonstrates how dense fine-mapping arrays coupled with functional genomic data can be utilized to identify candidate causal variants for functional follow-up.