Aims/hypothesis
Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in G6PC2 have been reported to be associated with fasting plasma glucose level in several populations of European descent. However,
whether G6PC2 variants have a similar effect in other ethnic groups is unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of
common variants of G6PC2 on type 2 diabetes and related clinical features in a Chinese population.
Methods
We selected four SNPs, rs13387347, rs2232316, rs492594 and rs16856187, tagging all the common variants spanning the G6PC2 gene (r
2 ≥ 0.8) based on HapMap Chinese data, and genotyped them in a group of 3,676 Shanghai Chinese individuals, comprising 1,876
cases and 1,800 controls.
Results
Three SNPs were nominally associated with type 2 diabetes, with rs16856187 showing the strongest evidence for association
(p = 0.0009, empirical p = 0.0047). Further conditional analysis revealed that the association signal arose from an individual SNP, rs16856187. This
SNP was also associated with fasting plasma glucose level in participants with normal glucose regulation (p = 0.0002), with the fasting plasma glucose level observed to increase by 0.067 mmol/l with each copy of the rare C allele.
Conclusions/interpretation
In this study we identified a novel risk-conferring G6PC2 SNP for type 2 diabetes in a Chinese population and confirmed the previous finding that G6PC2 variants are associated with fasting plasma glucose concentration.
Keywords Association study - Fasting glucose - G6PC2 - Genetics - Single nucleotide polymorphism - Type 2 diabetes
An erratum to this article can be found at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00125-009-1286-y