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Understanding the epigenome using system genetics


Type

Thesis

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Authors

Timmer, Sander Willem 

Abstract

Genetics has been successful in associating DNA sequence variants to both dichotomous and continuous traits in a variety of organisms, from plant and farm animal studies to human disease. With the advent of high-throughput genotyping, there has been an almost routine gen- eration of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) between human disease traits and genomic regions. Despite this success, a particular frustration is that the majority of associated loci are in non-coding regions of the genome and thus interpretation is hard. To improve characterisation of non-coding regions, molecular as- says can be used as a phenotype, and subsequently be used to explain how genetics alter molecular mechanisms. In this thesis, the inter- play of three molecular assays that are involved in regulating gene expression is studied. On 60 individuals, several assays are performed: FAIRE-chip, CTCF- seq, RNA-seq and DNA-seq. In the first part, the discovery and characteristics of FAIRE-QTLs is presented. The identified FAIRE-QTLs show strong overlap with other molecular QTLs, histone modifications, and transcription factors. The second part consists of the integration of genome-wide molecu- lar assays in a human population to reconstruct the human epigenome. Each of the molecular assays is associated with each of the other assays to discover phenotype-to-phenotype correlations. Furthermore, QTL data are used to dissect the causality for these phenotype-to-phenotype correlations in a system genetic manner. The third part presents a comprehensive view of CTCF binding on the X chromosome, and its implications for X-chromosome inactivation. A novel X chromosome-wide CTCF effect is observed. Using the gender of each of the cell lines, observations are made about which CTCF sites are dosage-compensated, active on both chromosomes, or are only bound in females.

Description

Date

Advisors

Keywords

genetics, epigenetics, gwas, dna, gene regulation

Qualification

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Awarding Institution

University of Cambridge

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 UK: England & Wales