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Genetic regulation of human aortic smooth muscle cell gene expression and splicing predict causal coronary artery disease genes

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the leading cause of death worldwide. Recent meta-analyses of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified over 175 loci associated with CAD. The majority of these loci are in non-coding regions and are predicted to regulate gene expression. Given that vascular smooth muscle cells (SMCs) play critical roles in the development and progression of CAD, we hypothesized that a subset of the CAD GWAS risk loci are associated with the regulation of transcription in distinct SMC phenotypes. Here, we measured gene expression in SMCs isolated from the ascending aortas of 151 ethnically diverse heart transplant donors in quiescent or proliferative conditions and calculated the association of their expression and splicing with ∼6.3 million imputed single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers across the genome. We identified 4,910 expression and 4,412 splice quantitative trait loci (sQTL) that represent regions of the genome associated with transcript abundance and splicing. 3,660 of the eQTLs had not been observed in the publicly available Genotype-Tissue Expression dataset. Further, 29 and 880 of the eQTLs were SMC- and sex-specific, respectively. To identify the effector transcript(s) regulated by CAD GWAS loci, we used four distinct colocalization approaches and identified 84 eQTL and 164 sQTLs that colocalized with CAD loci, highlighting the importance of genetic regulation of mRNA splicing as a molecular mechanism for CAD genetic risk. Notably, 20% and 35% of the eQTLs were unique to quiescent or proliferative SMCs, respectively. Two CAD loci colocalized with a SMC sex-specific eQTL (AL160313.1 and TERF2IP) and another locus colocalized with SMC-specific eQTL (ALKBH8). Also, 27% and 37% of the sQTLs were unique to quiescent or proliferative SMCs, respectively. The most significantly associated CAD locus, 9p21, was an sQTL for the long non-coding RNA CDKN2B-AS1, also known as ANRIL, in proliferative SMCs. Collectively, these results provide evidence for the molecular mechanisms of genetic susceptibility to CAD in distinct SMC phenotypes.