The regulation-of-autophagy pathway may influence Chinese stature variation: evidence from elder adults

Recent success of genome-wide association studies (GWASs) on human height variation emphasized the effects of individual loci or genes. In this study, we used a developed pathway-based approach to further test biological pathways for potential association with stature, by examining approximately 370,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across the human genome in 618 unrelated elder Han Chinese. A total of 626 biological pathways annotated by any of the three major public pathway databases (KEGG, BioCarta and Ambion GeneAssist Pathway Atlas) were tested. The regulation-of-autophagy (ROA) (nominal P=0.012) pathway was marginally significantly associated with human stature after our family wise error rate multiple-testing correction. We also used 1000 random recruited US whites for further replication. Interestingly, the ROA pathway presented the strongest signals in whites for height variation (nominal P=0.002). The results correspond to biological roles of the ROA pathway in human long bone development and growth. Our findings also implied that multiple-genetic factors may work jointly as a functional unit (pathway), and the traditional GWASs could have missed important genetic information imbedded in those less significant markers.