Chromatin atlas maps regulatory elements linked to Crohn's disease
Researchers built an atlas of 557,310 candidate cis-regulatory elements from mucosal samples from 23 Crohn's disease patients and 16 healthy controls, covering the human terminal ileum and ascending colon. The paper, published in Nature Genetics, used single-cell ATAC-seq to track regulatory programs during intestinal inflammation. Heritability for Crohn's disease concentrated mostly in immune cells, particularly T cells and neutrophils. Fine mapping pinpointed 30 noncoding disease variants sitting directly within those regulatory elements.
The atlas gives researchers a reference for studying how noncoding risk variants affect gene regulation in cells from Crohn's patients.
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