Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have identified multiple single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) susceptibility. However, the elucidation of causal SNPs and the biological mechanisms behind are still limited. In this study, we initially performed systematic bioinformatics analyses on CRC GWAS-identified loci to seek for potential functional SNPs located at transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs), and then a two-stage case-control study comprised of 1353 cases and 1448 controls of Chinese populations and functional analyses were conducted. As a result, only one SNP rs6695837 out of the nine candidate SNPs survived after two-stage analyses by Bonferroni correction. In combined analyses, rs6695837 exhibited significant associations with CRC risk (TT: CC, odds ratio (OR) = 1.31, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.06-1.63; dominant model, OR = 1.21, 95% CI = 1.03-1.43; additive model, OR = 1.15, 95% CI = 1.03-1.28). Functional annotations by RegulomeDB and rSNPBase indicated its biological role and dual-luciferase reporter assays revealed a significant increase in luciferase expression for the reconstructed plasmid with rs6695837T allele, compared with the one with C allele (PSW480 = 0.0002, PLovo = 0.0003). Further gene expression analyses demonstrated significantly higher expression of LAMC1 gene in CRC tumor tissues than that in adjacent non-cancerous tissues (P = 0.0004). These findings strongly suggest that the functional SNP located at TFBSs, rs6695837 might contribute to CRC susceptibility, and the exact biological mechanism awaits further research.
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