DANDELION Identifies Protein Palmitoylation as a Candidate Driver of Asthma

Overview

• Researchers at Columbia Mailman and the University of Chicago published a Cell paper this week describing DANDELION, a new computational framework and an openly available GitHub package for prioritizing disease‑driving genes.
• DANDELION combines large‑scale genetic data with trans‑regulatory signals to separate genes that likely cause disease from genes that are merely associated with it.
• Applied to asthma, the approach highlighted protein palmitoylation, and laboratory experiments showed enzymes that mediate palmitoylation influence airway inflammation and related cellular phenotypes.
• The team mapped their prioritized genes to cell types using the Human Lung Cell Atlas and reported specific disease‑proximal regulators such as SLC27A3 and SCD that affect inflammation and airway remodeling.
• Authors say DANDELION could be used across complex diseases and have released code to enable reuse, but independent validation and further preclinical work are needed before new therapies can emerge; the study was funded by NIH and the American Heart Association and reports no competing interests.