The missense variation landscape of FTO, MC4R and TMEM18 in obese children of African ancestry

Common variation at the loci harboring FTO, MC4R and TMEM18 is consistently reported as being statistically the most strongly associated with obesity. We investigated if these loci also harbor rarer missense variants that confer substantially higher risk of common childhood obesity in African American (AA) children. We sequenced the exons of FTO, MC4R and TMEM18 in an initial subset of our cohort i.e. 200 obese (BMI≥95(th) percentile) and 200 lean AA children (BMI≤5(th) percentile). Any missense exonic variants that were uncovered went on to be further genotyped in a further 768 obese and 768 lean (BMI≤50(th) percentile) children of the same ethnicity. A number of exonic variants were observed from our sequencing effort: seven in FTO, of which four were non-synonymous (A163T, G182A, M400V and A405V), thirteen in MC4R, of which six were non-synonymous (V103I, N123S, S136A, F202L, N240S and I251L) and four in TMEM18, of which two were non-synonymous (P2S and V113L). Follow-up genotyping of these missense variants revealed only one significant difference in allele frequency between cases and controls, namely with N240S in MC4R(Fisher's Exact P = 0.0001). In summary, moderately rare missense variants within the FTO, MC4R and TMEM18 genes observed in our study did not confer risk of common childhood obesity in African Americans except for a degree of evidence for one known loss-of-function variant in MC4R.