Genome-wide association studies in the Japanese population identify seven novel loci for type 2 diabetes

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified more than 80 susceptibility loci for type 2 diabetes (T2D), but most of its heritability still remains to be elucidated. In this study, we conducted a meta-analysis of GWAS for T2D in the Japanese population. Combined data from discovery and subsequent validation analyses (23,399 T2D cases and 31,722 controls) identify 7 new loci with genome-wide significance ( P <5 × 10 −8 ), rs1116357 near CCDC85A , rs147538848 in FAM60A , rs1575972 near DMRTA1 , rs9309245 near ASB3 , rs67156297 near ATP8B2 , rs7107784 near MIR4686 and rs67839313 near INAFM2 . Of these, the association of 4 loci with T2D is replicated in multi-ethnic populations other than Japanese (up to 65,936 T2Ds and 158,030 controls, P <0.007). These results indicate that expansion of single ethnic GWAS is still useful to identify novel susceptibility loci to complex traits not only for ethnicity-specific loci but also for common loci across different ethnicities.