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. 2019 May 22:5:8.
doi: 10.1038/s41531-019-0080-x. eCollection 2019.

Mitochondria function associated genes contribute to Parkinson's Disease risk and later age at onset

Collaborators, Affiliations

Mitochondria function associated genes contribute to Parkinson's Disease risk and later age at onset

Kimberley J Billingsley et al. NPJ Parkinsons Dis. .

Abstract

Mitochondrial dysfunction has been implicated in the etiology of monogenic Parkinson's disease (PD). Yet the role that mitochondrial processes play in the most common form of the disease; sporadic PD, is yet to be fully established. Here, we comprehensively assessed the role of mitochondrial function-associated genes in sporadic PD by leveraging improvements in the scale and analysis of PD GWAS data with recent advances in our understanding of the genetics of mitochondrial disease. We calculated a mitochondrial-specific polygenic risk score (PRS) and showed that cumulative small effect variants within both our primary and secondary gene lists are significantly associated with increased PD risk. We further reported that the PRS of the secondary mitochondrial gene list was significantly associated with later age at onset. Finally, to identify possible functional genomic associations we implemented Mendelian randomization, which showed that 14 of these mitochondrial function-associated genes showed functional consequence associated with PD risk. Further analysis suggested that the 14 identified genes are not only involved in mitophagy, but implicate new mitochondrial processes. Our data suggests that therapeutics targeting mitochondrial bioenergetics and proteostasis pathways distinct from mitophagy could be beneficial to treating the early stage of PD.

Keywords: Medical genetics; Risk factors.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interestsMike A. Nalls’ participation is supported by a consulting contract between Data Tecnica International and the National Institute on Aging, NIH, Bethesda, MD, USA, as a possible conflict of interest Dr. Nalls also consults for Neuro23 Inc, Lysosomal Therapeutics Inc, the Michael J. Fox Foundation, Illumina Inc. and Vivid Genomics among others. Dr. Gan-or also consults for for Lysosomal Therapeutics Inc., Denaly, Prevail Therapeutics, Idorsia, and Allergan. The other authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Workflow of mitochondrial-function specific PD analysis
Fig. 2
Fig. 2. Forest plots of PRS for Parkinson’s Disease across cohorts.
Random effect meta-analysis results are shown as red diamonds and fixed effects are shown as blue, with the centerline of each diamond representing the summary PRS for that dataset. IPDGC NeuroX = (Nalls et al. 2015, PMID:25444595), OSLO = Oslo Parkinson’s Disease Study, PDBP = Parkinson’s Disease Biomarker’s Program, PPMI = Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative, Baylor = Baylor College of Medicine/University of Maryland, German GWAS = (PMID:19915575), VANCE = Vance (dbGap phs000394)
Fig. 3
Fig. 3. Forest plots of PRS for the age at onset of Parkinson’s Disease across cohorts.
Random effect meta-analysis results are shown as red diamonds and fixed effects are shown as blue, with the centerline of each diamond representing the summary PRS for that dataset. OSLO = Oslo Parkinson’s Disease Study, PDBP = Parkinson’s Disease Biomarker’s Program, PPMI = Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative, German GWAS = (PMID:19915575), VANCE = Vance

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