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MAGMA-GTEx Analysis

I applied MAGMA to Keaton et al.'s1 meta-GWAS of diastolic blood pressure, using the GTEx bulk RNAseq2 as a reference. The significant and top non-significant tissue types are plotted below.

MAGMA-gtex-dbp-plot

Besides the expected arterial, heart-related tissues, and kidney-related tissues, a large number of reproductive tissues are found to be significant. As discussed here, this may be due to common smooth-muscle transcriptional programs, or due to the influence of sex hormones on blood pressure.

  1. Jacob M Keaton, Zoha Kamali, Tian Xie, Ahmad Vaez, Ariel Williams, Slavina B Goleva, Alireza Ani, Evangelos Evangelou, Jacklyn N Hellwege, Loic Yengo, and others. Genome-wide analysis in over 1 million individuals of European ancestry yields improved polygenic risk scores for blood pressure traits. Nature Genetics, 56(5):778–791, 2024. URL: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11096100/. ↩

  2. GTEx Consortium. The GTEx consortium atlas of genetic regulatory effects across human tissues. Science, 369(6509):1318–1330, 2020. URL: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aaz1776. ↩