Genome-wide association study reveals two loci for serum magnesium concentrations in European-American children

Sci Rep. 2015 Dec 21:5:18792. doi: 10.1038/srep18792.

Abstract

Magnesium ions are essential to the basic metabolic processes in the human body. Previous genetic studies indicate that serum magnesium levels are highly heritable, and a few genetic loci have been reported involving regulation of serum magnesium in adults. In this study, we examined if additional loci influence serum magnesium levels in children. We performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) on 2,267 European-American children genotyped on the Illumina HumanHap550 or Quad610 arrays, sharing over 500,000 markers, as the discovery cohort and 257 European-American children genotyped on the Illumina Human OmniExpress arrays as the replication cohort. After genotype imputation, the strongest associations uncovered were with imputed SNPs residing within the FGFR2 (rs1219515, P = 1.1 × 10(-5)) and PAPSS2 (rs1969821, P = 7.2 × 10(-6)) loci in the discovery cohort, both of which were robustly replicated in our independent patient cohort (rs1219515, P = 3.5 × 10(-3); rs1969821, P = 1.2 × 10(-2)). The associations at the FGFR2 locus were also weakly replicated in a dataset from a previous GWAS of serum magnesium in European adults. Our results indicate that FGFR2 and PAPSS2 may play an important role in the regulation of magnesium homeostasis in children of European-American ancestry.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Child
  • Female
  • Genetic Predisposition to Disease
  • Genome-Wide Association Study*
  • Genotype
  • Humans
  • Magnesium / blood*
  • Male
  • Multienzyme Complexes / genetics*
  • Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
  • Receptor, Fibroblast Growth Factor, Type 2 / genetics*
  • Sulfate Adenylyltransferase / genetics*
  • United States
  • White People / genetics

Substances

  • Multienzyme Complexes
  • FGFR2 protein, human
  • Receptor, Fibroblast Growth Factor, Type 2
  • PAPS synthetase
  • Sulfate Adenylyltransferase
  • Magnesium