Genetics

This post covers Fujimoto and colleagues' 2026 Nature Genetics study, the first MS GWAS in an East Asian population and a four-population meta-analysis of 29,374 cases and 1,843,563 controls. It follows the two Japanese loci including a novel 11q24 variant seen in no other population, what scaling to four ancestries added in 22 novel loci, the measurement of shared versus population-specific effects and the direct test of the sex-specific explanation, the four independent class II HLA signals of which three are new to the field, the single-cell scoring that puts risk in CD4 T cells and memory regulatory T cells in blood and in endothelial cells and astrocytes in brain, and the spatial transcriptomic niche analysis with its control traits and the four limitations the authors name.