Pathogenic missense protein variants affect different functional pathways and proteomic features than healthy population variants

Missense variants are present amongst the healthy population, but some of them are causative of human diseases. A classification of variants associated with healthy or diseased states is therefore not always straightforward. A deeper understanding of the nature of missense variants in health and disease, the cellular processes they may affect, and the general molecular principles which underlie these differences is essential to offer mechanistic explanations of the true impact of pathogenic variants. Here, we have formalised a statistical framework which enables robust probabilistic quantification of variant enrichment across full-length proteins, their domains, and 3D structure-defined regions. Using this framework, we validate and extend previously reported trends of variant enrichment in different protein structural regions (surface/core/interface). By examining the association of variant enrichment with available functional pathways and transcriptomic and proteomic (protein half-life, thermal stability, abundance) data, we have mined a rich set of molecular features which distinguish between pathogenic and population variants: Pathogenic variants mainly affect proteins involved in cell proliferation and nucleotide processing and are enriched in more abundant proteins. Additionally, rare population variants display features closer to common than pathogenic variants. We validate the association between these molecular features and variant pathogenicity by comparing against existing in silico variant impact annotations. This study provides molecular details into how different proteins exhibit resilience and/or sensitivity towards missense variants and provides the rationale to prioritise variant-enriched proteins and protein domains for therapeutic targeting and development. The ZoomVar database, which we created for this study, is available at fraternalilab.kct.uk/ZoomVar. It allows users to programmatically annotate missense variants with protein structural information and to calculate variant enrichment in different protein structural regions.

Automated summary

This study establishes a statistical framework for quantifying variant enrichment in protein structures, identifying molecular features that distinguish pathogenic from population variants, and providing a rationale for therapeutic targeting of variant-enriched proteins and domains. The created ZoomVar database allows programmatically annotating missense variants with protein structural information and calculating variant enrichment in different regions.