Multi-ancestry meta-analysis of host genetic susceptibility to tuberculosis identifies shared genetic architecture

The heritability of susceptibility to tuberculosis disease (TB) has been well recognized. Over one-hundred genes have been studied as candidates for TB susceptibility, and several variants were identified by genome-wide association studies (GWAS), but few replicates. We established the International Tuberculosis Host Genetics Consortium (ITHGC) to perform a multi-ancestry meta-analysis of GWAS including 14,153 cases and 19,536 controls of African, Asian, and European ancestry. Our analyses demonstrate a substantial degree of heritability (pooled polygenic h²=26.3% 95% CI 23.7–29.0%) for susceptibility to TB that is shared across ancestries, highlighting an important host genetic influence on disease. We identified one global host genetic correlate for TB at genome-wide significance (p < 5x10^-8) in the human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-II region (rs28383206, p-value = 5.2x10^-9). These data demonstrate the complex shared genetic architecture of susceptibility to TB and the importance of large-scale GWAS analysis across multiple ancestries experiencing different levels of infection pressures.

Summary statistics are stored as compressed .zip files.
Unzipped files can be opened with any text editor, Excel, or read into R programming environment (or equivalent data analysis software)' note the files are space-separated and have a header row. Each row in the files contains information for a single SNP. 

All authors have approved sharing the summary statistics of the analysis. The original individual datasets are only available from request from the original authors.