Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are idiopathic inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) that have a combined prevalence of approximately 100-200 per 100,000 in developed countries. Both diseases involve altered expression of proinflammatory and immunoregulatory cytokines within the intestinal mucosa; however, the clinical and pathological profiles for CD and UC are distinct. Epidemiological studies reveal a significant genetic contribution to the pathogenesis of IBD. The relative risk to siblings of affected individuals (ns) is estimated at 30-40 fold for CD and 10-20 fold for UC. In this application we propose to identify the genetic variation located in chromosomal regions 3p and 6p that confers genetic susceptibility to IBD. These regions were selected because of repeated evidence of linkage that has been observed in multiple genome-wide scans and strong evidence in a meta-analysis that we recently performed. Moreover, the chromosome 6p region contains the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) cluster of genes for which many associations to IBD have been reported, although the causal variants have yet to be identified. Prior studies in our laboratory provided the first extensive high resolution SNP analysis of the human genome. Specifically we performed SNP discovery by re-sequencing 470 kb in 8 individuals (>3.7 Mb of total sequence) in the cytokine gene cluster of chromosome 5q31 and discovered the underlying haplotype (haplotype = specific combinations of alleles) structure of the human genome. We recently demonstrated that the use of this haplotype structure could provide a powerful approach to performing association studies. The successful application of this approach enabled the identification of the genetic variation in the 5q31 cytokine gene cluster that confers susceptibility to Crohn's disease. In the current proposal we aim to take advantage of the haplotype structure of the genome to narrow down the linked regions on chromosomes 3p and 6p and to identify the causal genetic variation conferring susceptibility to IBD.
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