As product of a highly collaborative effort in the International Inflammatory Bowel Disease Consortium, “Large-scale sequencing identifies multiple genes and rare variants associated with Crohn’s disease susceptibility” is now published in Nature Genetics.

We directly implicated ten genes that elevate or lower a person’s risk of Crohn’s disease, a form of inflammatory bowel disease. Six of those genes had no previous links to the disorder, and four are in regions of the genome that other studies had linked to Crohn’s disease.

NIDDK has awarded the Huang Lab a 5-year R01 grant to identify and characterize causal variants underlying inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). Through a collaboration with the Marson lab, we will identify putative causal variants for IBD through harmonizing and fine-mapping large-scale genomic resources across multiple ancestries, and characterize their molecular and cellular impacts through targeted genome perturbations and knockins in human T cells. We hope the new IBD causal variants and biology from this study will provide new insights into IBD pathogenesis, make an important positive impact and serve as the fundamental resource and basis for novel IBD therapeutics.

Yu Chen received the Hugh Gurling Memorial Award in International Society of Psychiatric Genetics 

Ruize Liu received the ASHG/Charles J. Epstein Trainee Awards for Excellence in Human Genetics Research – Semi-Finalists