Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 394

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 12 of the 12 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Architecture of Gene Regulatory Variation across Multiple Human Tissues: The MuTHER Study

Open access
Nica, Alexandra C., Parts, Leopold, Glass, Daniel, Nisbet, James, Barrett, Amy, Sekowska, Magdalena, Travers, Mary, Potter, Simon, Grundberg, Elin, Small, Kerrin, Hedman, Åsa K., Bataille, Veronique, Tzenova Bell, Jordana, Surdulescu, Gabriela, Dimas, Antigone S., Ingle, Catherine, Nestle, Frank O., di Meglio, Paola, Min, Josine L., Wilk, Alicja, Hammond, Christopher J., Hassanali, Neelam, Yang, Tsun-Po, Montgomery, Stephen B., O'Rahilly, Steve, Lindgren, Cecilia M., Zondervan, Krina T., Soranzo, Nicole, Barroso, Inês, Durbin, Richard, Ahmadi, Kourosh, Deloukas, Panos, McCarthy, Mark I., Dermitzakis, Emmanouil T., Spector, Timothy D., The MuTHER Consortium·2011·PLoS Genetics

Abstract

While there have been studies exploring regulatory variation in one or more tissues, the complexity of tissue-specificity in multiple primary tissues is not yet well understood. We explore in depth the role of cis-regulatory variation in three human tissues: lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCL), skin, and fat. The samples (156 LCL, 160 skin, 166 fat) were derived simultaneously from a subset of well-phenotyped healthy female twins of the MuTHER resource. We discover an abundance of cis-eQTLs in each tissue similar to previous estimates (858 or 4.7% of genes). In addition, we apply factor analysis (FA) to remove effects of latent variables, thus more than doubling the number of our discoveries (1,822 eQTL genes). The unique study design (Matched Co-Twin Analysis--MCTA) permits immediate replication of eQTLs using co-twins (93%-98%) and validation of the considerable gain in eQTL discovery after FA correction. We highlight the challenges of comparing eQTLs between tissues. After verifying previous significance threshold-based estimates of tissue-specificity, we show their limitations given their dependency on statistical power. We propose that continuous estimates of the proportion of tissue-shared signals and direct comparison of the magnitude of effect on the fold change in expression are essential properties that jointly provide a biologically realistic view of tissue-specificity. Under this framework we demonstrate that 30% of eQTLs are shared among the three tissues studied, while another 29% appear exclusively tissue-specific. However, even among the shared eQTLs, a substantial proportion (10%-20%) have significant differences in the magnitude of fold change between genotypic classes across tissues. Our results underline the need to account for the complexity of eQTL tissue-specificity in an effort to assess consequences of such variants for complex traits.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1371/journal.pgen.1002003

Cites

12 of 12 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 12 references

Cited by

See all 394

Metadata

Authors
Nica, A. C., Parts, L., Glass, D., Nisbet, J., Barrett, A., Sekowska, M., Travers, M., Potter, S., Grundberg, E., Small, K., Hedman, Å. K., Bataille, V., Tzenova Bell, J., Surdulescu, G., Dimas, A. S., Ingle, C., Nestle, F. O., di Meglio, P., Min, J. L., Wilk, A., Hammond, C. J., Hassanali, N., Yang, T.-P., Montgomery, S. B., O'Rahilly, S., Lindgren, C. M., Zondervan, K. T., Soranzo, N., Barroso, I., Durbin, R., Ahmadi, K., Deloukas, P., McCarthy, M. I., Dermitzakis, E. T., Spector, T. D., & The MuTHER Consortium
Venue
PLoS Genetics
Published
2011-02-03
Volume
7
Issue
2
Pages
e1002003
ISSN
  • 1553-7390 (ISSN-L)
  • 1553-7404
OpenAlex
W1972698844
Cited by
394
References
12
FWCI
37.64
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Architecture of Gene Regulatory Variation across Multiple Human Tissues: The MuTHER Study. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1371/journal.pgen.1002003
The paper
Nica, A. C., Parts, L., Glass, D., Nisbet, J., Barrett, A., Sekowska, M., Travers, M., Potter, S., Grundberg, E., Small, K., Hedman, Å. K., Bataille, V., Tzenova Bell, J., Surdulescu, G., Dimas, A. S., Ingle, C., Nestle, F. O., di Meglio, P., Min, J. L., . . . The MuTHER Consortium. (2011). The Architecture of Gene Regulatory Variation across Multiple Human Tissues: The MuTHER Study. PLoS Genetics. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1002003

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.