Human serum proteome profoundly overlaps with genetic signatures of disease

Circulating proteins are prognostic for human outcomes including cancer, heart failure, brain trauma and brain amyloid plaque burden. A deep serum proteome survey recently revealed close associations of serum protein networks and common diseases. The present study reveals unprecedented number of individual serum proteins that overlap genetic signatures of diseases emanating from different tissues of the body. Here, 55,932 low-frequency and common exome-array variants were compared with 4782 protein measurements in the serum of 5457 individuals of the deeply annotated AGES Reykjavik cohort. At a Bonferroni adjusted P-value threshold