Deep learning predicts the impact of regulatory variants on cell-type-specific enhancers in the brain

Previous studies have shown that the heritability of multiple brain-related traits and disorders is highly enriched in transcriptional enhancer regions. However, these regions often contain many individual variants, while only a subset of them are likely to causally contribute to a trait. Statistical fine-mapping techniques can identify putative causal variants, but their resolution is often limited, especially in regions with multiple variants in high linkage disequilibrium. In these cases, alternative computational methods to estimate the impact of individual variants can aid in variant prioritization.

Here, we develop a deep learning pipeline to predict cell-type-specific enhancer activity directly from genomic sequences and quantify the impact of individual genetic variants in these regions. We show that the variants highlighted by our deep learning models are targeted by purifying selection in the human population, likely indicating a functional role. We integrate our deep learning predictions with statistical fine-mapping results for 8 brain-related traits, identifying 63 distinct candidate causal variants predicted to contribute to these traits by modulating enhancer activity, representing 6% of all genome-wide association study signals analyzed. Overall, our study provides a valuable computational method that can prioritize individual variants based on their estimated regulatory impact, but also highlights the limitations of existing methods for variant prioritization and fine-mapping.

The data underlying this article, nucleotide-level importance scores, and code for running the deep learning pipeline are available at https://github.com/Pandaman-Ryan/AgentBind-brain.

mgymrek@ucsd.edu.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics Advances online.