Mendelian randomization and genetic colocalization infer the effects of the multi-tissue proteome on 211 complex disease-related phenotypes.

Human proteins are widely used as drug targets. Integration of large-scale protein-level genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and disease-related GWAS has thus connected genetic variation to disease mechanisms via protein. Previous proteome-by-phenome-wide Mendelian randomization (MR) studies have been mainly focused on plasma proteomes. Previous MR studies using the brain proteome only reported protein effects on a set of pre-selected tissue-specific diseases. No studies, however, have used high-throughput proteomics from multiple tissues to perform MR on hundreds of phenotypes.