Genome wide association studies (GWAS) have been extremely powerful and successful identifying associations between genetic polymorphisms (SNP) and diabetic and chronic kidney disease (CKD) development. Our next big challenge is to translate this information to understand the mechanism of diabetic and CKD development. The major hurdle is that the majority of CKD associated polymorphisms lie outside the coding region of the genome. Therefore classic protein biochemistry and gene deletion studies of model organisms cannot yet be applied. Several recent pioneering studies have provided a novel framework for such experiments and indicate that the cell type specific epigenome can be used to understand and annotate the non-coding region of the genome. As there are hundreds of established SNPs for CKD, performing individual experiments for each SNP could be a daunting task, therefore there is a critical need for genome wide cell type specific mapping of non-coding regulatory regions and defining the correlation between SNP's and transcript levels. The proposal will use a combination of methods to dissect the association between diabetic and chronic kidney disease associated polymorphisms and disease.
One in ten American -about 20 million people- suffer from chronic kidney disease (CKD). More than half a million people carry the diagnosis of the most severe form of CKD, end stage renal disease (ESRD). ESRD can only be treated with dialysis or transplantation. The yearly mortality rate of patients on dialysis can be as high as 20%, which is higher than patients with prostate or breast cancer. Multiple different approaches have been attempted to understand the mechanism of CKD.
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