Interpreting Coronary Artery Disease Risk Through Gene-Environment Interactions in Gene Regulation

GWAS and eQTL studies identified thousands of genetic variants associated with complex traits and gene expression. Despite the important role of environmental exposures in complex traits, only a limited number of environmental factors are measured in these studies. Measuring molecular phenotypes in tightly controlled cellular environments provides a more tractable setting to study gene-environment interactions in the absence of other confounding variables. We performed RNA-seq and ATAC-seq in endothelial cells exposed to retinoic acid, dexamethasone, caffeine, and selenium to model genetic and environmental effects on gene regulation in the vascular endothelium, a common site of pathology in cardiovascular disease. We found that genes near regions of differentially accessible chromatin were more likely to be differentially expressed (OR = [3.41, 6.52], p