GATA3 and rheumatoid arthritis: Zhong et al. (2025) This locus is interesting because many immune-related traits map to this locus, including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes and allergic diseases. Interpreting these genetic associations is challenging because the associated variants are far from any protein coding sequence. However, a very recent study of GATA3, which is the closest gene to these putative causal variants, discovered a 44-kb regulatory sequence located approximately 1 Mb downstream of GATA3 that is a distal enhancer of GATA3 in Th2 cells (Chen et al., 2023).