Multi-tissue analyses of allele-specific chromatin accessibility nominate likely functional variants for type 2 diabetes

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Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified >1,200 signals associated with type 2 diabetes (T2D), yet identifying functional variants remains challenging because the majority of them lie in noncoding regions of the genome and are in areas of high linkage disequilibrium (LD). While chromatin accessibility QTL (caQTL) and expression QTL (eQTL) analyses are useful for nominating regulatory mechanisms underlying GWAS signals, limitations still exist in pinpointing functional variants within regions of high LD. A complementary approach that has been less frequently applied is to focus on the allele-specific effect on chromatin accessibility at heterozygous single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), hereafter referred to as allelic imbalance. We analyzed the allelic imbalance of reads generated from an assay for transposase-accessible chromatin with sequencing (ATAC-seq) across genotyped samples from 490 donors in T2D-relevant tissues: skeletal muscle, liver, pancreatic islets, adipose tissue, and relevant cell types. We identified 119,949 allelically imbalanced SNPs (FDR