Deciphering the Impact of Genetic Variation on Human Polyadenylation

Abstract

Genetic variants that disrupt polyadenylation can cause or contribute to genetic disorders. Yet, due to the complex cis-regulation of polyadenylation, variant interpretation remains challenging. Here, we introduce a residual neural network model, APARENT2, that can infer 3-cleavage and polyadenylation from DNA sequence more accurately than any previous model. This model generalizes to the case of alternative polyadenylation (APA) for a variable number of polyadenylation signals. We demonstrate APARENT2s performance on several variant datasets, including functional reporter data and human 3 aQTLs from GTEx. We apply neural network interpretation methods to gain insights into disrupted or protective higher-order features of polyadenylation. We fine-tune APARENT2 on human tissue-resolved transcriptomic data to elucidate tissue-specific variant effects. Finally, we perform in-silico saturation mutagenesis of all human polyadenylation signals and compare the predicted effects of >44 million variants against gnomAD. While loss-of-function variants were generally selected against, we also find specific clinical conditions linked to gain-of-function mutations. For example, using APARENT2s predictions we detect an association between gain-of-function mutations in the 3-end and Autism Spectrum Disorder.