Correction: Abundant Genetic Overlap between Blood Lipids and Immune-Mediated Diseases Indicates Shared Molecular Genetic Mechanisms

Epidemiological studies suggest a relationship between blood lipids and immune-mediated diseases, but the nature of these associations is not well understood. We used genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to investigate shared single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) between blood lipids and immune-mediated diseases. We analyzed data fromGWAS (n~200,000 individuals), applying new False Discovery Rate (FDR) methods, to investigate genetic overlap between blood lipid levels [triglycerides (TG), low density lipoproteins (LDL), high density lipoproteins (HDL)] and a selection of archetypal immune-mediated diseases (Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, celiac disease, psoriasis and sarcoidosis). We found significant polygenic pleiotropy between the blood lipids PLOSONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone. 0123057 April 8, 2015 1 / 17 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Andreassen OA, Desikan RS, Wang Y, Thompson WK, Schork AJ, Zuber V, et al. (2015) Abundant Genetic Overlap between Blood Lipids and Immune-Mediated Diseases Indicates Shared Molecular Genetic Mechanisms. PLoS ONE 10(4): e0123057. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0123057 Received: October 30, 2014 Accepted: January 16, 2015 Published: April 8, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Andreassen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Data cannot be made publicly available because they were obtained from third parties. Summary statistics used in this study are available at: http://www.sph. umich.edu/csg/ abecasis/public/lipids2013/ and http://www. ibdgenetics.org/downloads.html. Data on Sarcoidosis (SARC) can be requested from Prof. Stefan Schreiber ( s.schreiber@mucosa.de), Department of General Internal Medicine and Popgen Biobank, University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein, Kiel, Germany. Data on Celiac Disease (CeD) can be requested from Prof. Lude Franke ( lude@cleverfranke.com) and David A van Heel ( d. vanheel@qmul.ac.uk), Blizard Institute of Cell and Molecular Science, Barts and The London School of and all the investigated immune-mediated diseases. We discovered several shared risk loci between the immune-mediated diseases and TG (n = 88), LDL (n = 87) and HDL (n = 52). Three-way analyses differentiated the pattern of pleiotropy among the immune-mediated diseases. The new pleiotropic loci increased the number of functional gene network nodes representing blood lipid loci by 40%. Pathway analyses implicated several novel shared mechanisms for immune pathogenesis and lipid biology, including glycosphingolipid synthesis (e.g. FUT2) and intestinal host-microbe interactions (e.g. ATG16L1). We demonstrate a shared genetic basis for blood lipids and immune-mediated diseases independent of environmental factors. Our findings provide novel mechanistic insights into dyslipidemia and immune-mediated diseases and may have implications for therapeutic trials involving lipidlowering and anti-inflammatory agents.