ImmuneRegulation: A web-based tool for identifying human immune regulatory elements

Humans can vary considerably in their healthy immune phenotypes and in their immune responses to various stimuli. We have developed an interactive web-based tool, ImmuneRegulation, to enable discovery of human regulatory elements that drive some of the phenotypic differences observed in gene expression profiles. ImmuneRegulation currently provides the largest centrally integrated resource available in the literature on transcriptome regulation in whole blood and blood cell types, including genotype data from 23,040 individuals, with associated gene expression data from 30,562 experiments, that provide genetic variant-gene expression associations on ~200 million eQTLs. In addition, it includes 14 million transcription factor (TF) binding region hits extracted from 1945 TF ChIP-seq peaks and the latest GWAS catalog of 67,230 published SNP-trait associations. Users can interactively explore ImmuneRegulation to visualize and discover associations between their gene(s) of interest and their regulators (genetic variants or transcription factors) across multiple cohorts and studies. These regulators can explain cohort or cell type dependent gene expression variations and may be critical in selecting the ideal cohorts or cell types for follow-up studies. Overall, ImmuneRegulation aims to contribute to our understanding of the effects of eQTLs and TFs on heterogeneous transcriptional responses reported in studies on the blood; in the development of molecular signatures of immune response; and facilitate their future application in patient management. ImmuneRegulation is freely available at http://icahn.mssm.edu/immuneregulation.