Integrative Analysis Confirmed the Association between Osteoprotegerin and Osteoporosis.

Objective This study aimed to verify the association between osteoprotegerin gene () and its variants with osteoporosis (OP) by performing integrative analysis.Methods We used the KGG software to perform gene-based association analysis, which integrated all publicly available single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based values and obtained an overall value for the . The significant SNPs were screened for expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs). Meta-analysis was used to combine the associations between the variants of and bone mineral density (BMD) reported in the literatures. Then we performed dual-luciferase reporter gene systems for the functional verification of the variants of .Results In the gene-based association analysis, the over all value of was 6.24×10 for BMD at femoral neck (FN) and 7.37×10 for BMD at lumbar spine (LS), indicating the importance of for OP. The publicly available eQTL database identified 5 eQTLs which exert cis-regulation effects on at FN and LS. Literature searching found that rs2073617 (known as T950C) was the hot spot SNP. There were 13 relevant studies on rs2073617 besides the GEFOS-2 study identified from the PubMed. Significant differences among TT, TC and CC genotypes at FN (= 0.047) and LS (= 0.025) were shown by meta-analysis, demonstrating the associations between T950C polymorphism and BMD. Luciferase gene expression was significantly higher at the presence of allele C than allele T in the 293T cells (=-9.47, <0.01). Conclusion The integrative analysis further confirmed the importance of in OP and the correlation of T950C polymorphism with BMD of OP. The strategy can be used as a reference for functional interpretation of other disease-related genes.