The NLRC5 – chronic inflammation network

posted in: Comics, Miscellaneous

This is an example for an application of The Molecular Human, drawn from our study Zaghlool et al., Epigenetics meets proteomics in an epigenome-wide association study with circulating blood plasma protein traits, Nat. Comms. 2020.

DNA methylation and blood circulating proteins have been associated with many complex disorders, but the underlying disease-causing mechanisms often remain unclear. We reported an epigenome-wide association study with proteomics. Overlapping associations with transcriptomics, metabolomics, and clinical endpoints suggested implication of processes related to chronic low-grade inflammation, including a network involving methylation of the here discussed NLRC5 gene, a regulator of the inflammasome.

In that study we found in particular an association of DNA methylation (cg07839457 near NLRC5 on chromosome 16, position 57,023,022) with multiple omics phenotypes, as shown below.

Figure from Zaghlool et al., Nat. Comms, 2022.

Here we investigate the network around the methylation cg07839457 near NLRC5 using The Molecular Human.

Click here to open the NLRC5 network around cg07839457

The comics network around NLRC5 cg07839457.

Note that there are multiple associations that we did not report in Zaghlool et al., i.e. an association of cg07839457 with IgG4_G1F glycosylation. IgG glycosylation plays an important role in inflammation (see for instance this paper on the role of IgG glycosylation in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases).