Genome-Wide Association Study in African-Americans with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Systemic lupus erythematosus lupus is a potentially deadly systemic autoimmune disease that disproportionately afflicts women and African-Americans. This project is designed to discover genes that increase the risk of lupus in African-American. Our goal was to expand the genotyping density by genotyping a subset of our African-American lupus cases and controls on the OMNI-1S platform and then to exploit this genotyping with sequencing and follow up genotyping in an effort to identify the genes that alter disease risk. Two years ago we abandoned our hope of genotyping the control samples from Detroit and instead found and have already genotyped 3000 African-American controls on the OMNI-Express. These reagents were purchased by our collaborator. At this point the genotyping is completed and we are working on the quality control and data analysis. As we work through the remaining issues population stratification, imputation, and detailed exploration of positive findings we are hopeful to be composing our genome wide association study manuscript in the months to come and then turn our attention to the follow up studies with sequencing data and follow up genotyping. The project now appears to be spectacularly productive with a substantial number of previously unknown genetic associations that are newly detected by this project.