Cell Genomics (Mar 2022)

Decoding the diversity of killer immunoglobulin-like receptors by deep sequencing and a high-resolution imputation method

  • Saori Sakaue,
  • Kazuyoshi Hosomichi,
  • Jun Hirata,
  • Hirofumi Nakaoka,
  • Keiko Yamazaki,
  • Makoto Yawata,
  • Nobuyo Yawata,
  • Tatsuhiko Naito,
  • Junji Umeno,
  • Takaaki Kawaguchi,
  • Toshiyuki Matsui,
  • Satoshi Motoya,
  • Yasuo Suzuki,
  • Hidetoshi Inoko,
  • Atsushi Tajima,
  • Takayuki Morisaki,
  • Koichi Matsuda,
  • Yoichiro Kamatani,
  • Kazuhiko Yamamoto,
  • Ituro Inoue,
  • Yukinori Okada

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2, no. 3
p. 100101

Abstract

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Summary: The killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptor (KIR) recognizes human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class I molecules and modulates the function of natural killer cells. Despite its role in immunity, the complex genomic structure has limited a deep understanding of the KIR genomic landscape. Here we conduct deep sequencing of 16 KIR genes in 1,173 individuals. We devise a bioinformatics pipeline incorporating copy number estimation and insertion or deletion (indel) calling for high-resolution KIR genotyping. We define 118 alleles in 13 genes and demonstrate a linkage disequilibrium structure within and across KIR centromeric and telomeric regions. We construct a KIR imputation reference panel (nreference = 689, imputation accuracy = 99.7%), apply it to biobank genotype (ntotal = 169,907), and perform phenome-wide association studies of 85 traits. We observe a dearth of genome-wide significant associations, even in immune traits implicated previously to be associated with KIR (the smallest p = 1.5 × 10−4). Our pipeline presents a broadly applicable framework to evaluate innate immunity in large-scale datasets.

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