Informing disease modelling with brain-relevant functional genomic annotations

The past decade has seen a surge in the number of disease/trait-associated variants, largely because of the union of studies to share genetic data and the availability of electronic health records from large cohorts for research use. Variant discovery for neurological and neuropsychiatric genome-wide association studies, including schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, has greatly benefitted; however, the translation of these genetic association results to interpretable biological mechanisms and models is lagging. Interpreting disease-associated variants requires knowledge of gene regulatory mechanisms and computational tools that permit integration of this knowledge with genome-wide association study results. Here, we summarize key conceptual advances in the generation of brain-relevant functional genomic annotations and amongst tools that allow integration of these annotations with association summary statistics, which together provide a new and exciting opportunity to identify disease-relevant genes, pathways and cell types in silico. We discuss the opportunities and challenges associated with these developments and conclude with our perspective on future advances in annotation generation, tool development and the union of the two.