Genes involved in Crohn's disease

An international consortium of researchers has identified genetic variants in 10 genes that elevate a person's susceptibility to Crohn's disease, a form of inflammatory bowel disease. These discoveries highlight the causal role of mesenchymal cells in intestinal inflammation, helping to zero in on the genetic roots of inflammatory bowel disease and providing better data with which to develop the next generation of treatments.

In this study, researchers at the Welcome Sanger Institute and the Broad Institute set out to identify rare genetic variants within protein-coding genes that are associated with Crohn's disease susceptibility. They performed exome sequencing on around 30,000 patients with Crohn's and compared these to exome sequences from around 80,000 individuals without the condition. This identified genetic variation within six genes in regions of the genome that had not been previously connected to Crohn's disease. Several of these genes are known to play important roles in a type of stem cell in the gut called mesenchymal cells suggesting that disruption of these cells contributes to the initiation and maintenance of intestinal inflammation.

Ref:

Venkataraman and Kai Yuan et al. (2022). Large-scale sequencing identifies multiple genes and rare variants associated with Crohn's disease susceptibility,Nature Genetics,10.1038/s41588-022-01156-2