Nature Communications (May 2019)

Functional rare and low frequency variants in BLK and BANK1 contribute to human lupus

  • Simon H. Jiang,
  • Vicki Athanasopoulos,
  • Julia I. Ellyard,
  • Aaron Chuah,
  • Jean Cappello,
  • Amelia Cook,
  • Savit B. Prabhu,
  • Jacob Cardenas,
  • Jinghua Gu,
  • Maurice Stanley,
  • Jonathan A. Roco,
  • Ilenia Papa,
  • Mehmet Yabas,
  • Giles D. Walters,
  • Gaetan Burgio,
  • Kathryn McKeon,
  • James M. Byers,
  • Charlotte Burrin,
  • Anselm Enders,
  • Lisa A. Miosge,
  • Pablo F. Canete,
  • Marija Jelusic,
  • Velibor Tasic,
  • Adrian C. Lungu,
  • Stephen I. Alexander,
  • Arthur R. Kitching,
  • David A. Fulcher,
  • Nan Shen,
  • Todor Arsov,
  • Paul A. Gatenby,
  • Jeff J. Babon,
  • Dominic F. Mallon,
  • Carmen de Lucas Collantes,
  • Eric A. Stone,
  • Philip Wu,
  • Matthew A. Field,
  • Thomas D. Andrews,
  • Eun Cho,
  • Virginia Pascual,
  • Matthew C. Cook,
  • Carola G. Vinuesa

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10242-9
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 1
pp. 1 – 12

Abstract

Read online

Function-altering variants of immune-related genes cause rare autoimmune syndromes, whereas their contribution to common autoimmune diseases remains uncharacterized. Here the authors show that rare variants of lupus-associated genes are present in the majority of lupus patients and healthy controls, but only the variants found in lupus patients alter gene function.