The NUS1 gene was recently associated with Parkinson's disease (PD) in the Chinese population. Here, as part of the International Parkinson's Disease Genomics Consortium, we have leveraged large-scale PD case-control cohorts to comprehensively assess damaging NUS1 variants in individuals of European descent. Burden analysis of rare nonsynonymous damaging variants across case-control individuals from whole-exome and -genome data sets did not find evidence of NUS1 association with PD. Overall, single-variant tests for rare (minor allele frequency<0.01) and common (minor allele frequency>0.01) variants, including 15 PD-GWAS cohorts and summary statistics from the largest PD GWAS meta-analysis to date, also did not uncover any associations. Our results indicate a lack of evidence for a role of rare damaging nonsynonymous NUS1 variants in PD in unrelated case-control cohorts of European descent, suggesting that the previously observed association could be driven by extremely rare population-specific variants.
Keywords: NUS1; Parkinson's disease; Rare-variant burden.
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