ROCK2 allelic variants are not associated with pre-eclampsia susceptibility in the Finnish population

Abstract

The rho-associated coiled-coil protein kinase 2 (ROCK2) gene has been suggested to associate with general hypertension and is therefore a plausible functional candidate gene for pre-eclampsia. ROCK2 maps to chromosome 2p25, which we have implicated previously in a linkage study of pre-eclampsia. We have re-sequenced exons and putative promoter region of ROCK2 in up to 30 pre-eclampsia patients and 22 controls and genotyped putative functional single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) as well as tagging SNPs from HapMap in a Finnish case-control data set-340 affected and 357 matched control individuals-for a genetic association study of ROCK2 in pre-eclampsia. Even though several new SNPs were discovered, we did not detect significant allelic or haplotypic association between ROCK2 and pre-eclampsia. We assessed ROCK2 expression in placentas by microarray analysis, but no significant expression differences were observed when comparing preeclamptic and normotensive pregnancies. We conclude that common genetic variation in ROCK2 is unlikely to make a major contribution to the risk of pre-eclampsia, but cannot exclude the possibility of having missed non-coding functional variants or rare coding variants. © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. All rights reserved.