Posted April 9th, 2021 for Broad Institute Welcome to the April 9, 2021 installment of Research Roundup , a recurring snapshot of recent studies published by scientists at the Broad Institute and their collaborators. Enhancing V2F maps GWASs have yielded thousands of genetic variants linked to disease. To help figure out the function of many of these variants, Joseph Nasser (now at Caltech), Drew Bergman, Charles Fulco (now at Bristol Myers Squibb), Philine Guckelberger (now at the Free University of Berlin), Benjamin Doughty (now at Stanford University), Eric Lander (on leave), Jesse Engreitz (now at Stanford), and colleagues used their activity-by-contact (ABC) model to build maps that connect enhancers to their target genes in 131 cell types and tissues. Using those maps, the team linked more than 5,000 GWAS signals to nearly 2,250 genes across 72 traits and diseases. The researchers also predicted which enhancers contain risk variants for inflammatory bowel disease, suggesting a possible disease mechanism. Read more in