- Zou, Xudong;
- Zhao, Zhaozhao;
- Chen, Yu;
- Xiong, Kewei;
- Wang, Zeyang;
- Chen, Shuxin;
- Chen, Hui;
- Wei, Gong-Hong;
- Xu, Shuhua;
- Li, Wei;
- Ni, Ting;
- Li, Lei
Although rare non-coding variants (RVs) play crucial roles in complex traits and diseases, understanding their mechanisms and identifying disease-associated RVs continue to be major challenges. Here we constructed a comprehensive atlas of alternative polyadenylation (APA) outliers (aOutliers), including 1334 3 UTR and 200 intronic aOutliers, from 15,201 samples across 49 human tissues. These aOutliers exhibit unique characteristics from transcription or splicing outliers, with a pronounced RV enrichment. Mechanistically, aOutlier-RVs alter poly(A) signals and splicing sites, and perturbation indeed triggers APA events. Furthermore, we developed a Bayesian-based APA RV prediction model, which successfully pinpointed a specific set of 1799 RVs impacting 278 genes with significantly large disease effect sizes. Notably, we observed a convergence effect between rare and common cancer variants, exemplified by regulation in the DDX18 gene. Together, this study introduced an APA-enhanced framework for genome annotation, underscoring APAs role in uncovering functional RVs linked to complex traits and diseases.