scholarly journals A Bayesian Framework for Multiple Trait Colocalization from Summary Association Statistics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Giambartolomei ◽  
Jimmy Zhenli Liu ◽  
Wen Zhang ◽  
Mads Hauberg ◽  
Huwenbo Shi ◽  
...  

AbstractMotivationMost genetic variants implicated in complex diseases by genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are non-coding, making it challenging to understand the causative genes involved in disease. Integrating external information such as quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping of molecular traits (e.g., expression, methylation) is a powerful approach to identify the subset of GWAS signals explained by regulatory effects. In particular, expression QTLs (eQTLs) help pinpoint the responsible gene among the GWAS regions that harbor many genes, while methylation QTLs (mQTLs) help identify the epigenetic mechanisms that impact gene expression which in turn affect disease risk. In this work we propose multiple-trait-coloc (moloc), a Bayesian statistical framework that integrates GWAS summary data with multiple molecular QTL data to identify regulatory effects at GWAS risk loci.ResultsWe applied moloc to schizophrenia (SCZ) and eQTL/mQTL data derived from human brain tissue and identified 52 candidate genes that influence SCZ through methylation. Our method can be applied to any GWAS and relevant functional data to help prioritize disease associated genes.Availabilitymoloc is available for download as an R package (https://github.com/clagiamba/moloc). We also developed a web site to visualize the biological findings (icahn.mssm.edu/moloc). The browser allows searches by gene, methylation probe, and scenario of [email protected] informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Author(s):  
Nora Scherer ◽  
Peggy Sekula ◽  
Peter Pfaffelhuber ◽  
Pascal Schlosser

Abstract Motivation When performing genome-wide association studies conventionally the additive genetic model is used to explore whether a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) is associated with a quantitative trait. But for variants, which do not follow an intermediate mode of inheritance (MOI), the recessive or the dominant genetic model can have more power to detect associations and furthermore the MOI is important for downstream analyses and clinical interpretation. When multiple MOIs are modelled the question arises, which describes the true underlying MOI best. Results We developed an R-package allowing for the first time to determine study specific critical values when one of the three models is more informative than the other ones for a quantitative trait locus. The package allows for user-friendly simulations to determine these critical values with predefined minor allele frequencies and study sizes. For application scenarios with extensive multiple testing we integrated an interpolation functionality to determine critical values already based on a moderate number of random draws. Availability and implementation The R-package pgainsim is freely available for download on Github at https://github.com/genepi-freiburg/pgainsim. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (15) ◽  
pp. 4374-4376
Author(s):  
Ninon Mounier ◽  
Zoltán Kutalik

Abstract Summary Increasing sample size is not the only strategy to improve discovery in Genome Wide Association Studies (GWASs) and we propose here an approach that leverages published studies of related traits to improve inference. Our Bayesian GWAS method derives informative prior effects by leveraging GWASs of related risk factors and their causal effect estimates on the focal trait using multivariable Mendelian randomization. These prior effects are combined with the observed effects to yield Bayes Factors, posterior and direct effects. The approach not only increases power, but also has the potential to dissect direct and indirect biological mechanisms. Availability and implementation bGWAS package is freely available under a GPL-2 License, and can be accessed, alongside with user guides and tutorials, from https://github.com/n-mounier/bGWAS. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. i194-i202
Author(s):  
Berk A Alpay ◽  
Pinar Demetci ◽  
Sorin Istrail ◽  
Derek Aguiar

Abstract Motivation Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have discovered thousands of significant genetic effects on disease phenotypes. By considering gene expression as the intermediary between genotype and disease phenotype, expression quantitative trait loci studies have interpreted many of these variants by their regulatory effects on gene expression. However, there remains a considerable gap between genotype-to-gene expression association and genotype-to-gene expression prediction. Accurate prediction of gene expression enables gene-based association studies to be performed post hoc for existing GWAS, reduces multiple testing burden, and can prioritize genes for subsequent experimental investigation. Results In this work, we develop gene expression prediction methods that relax the independence and additivity assumptions between genetic markers. First, we consider gene expression prediction from a regression perspective and develop the HAPLEXR algorithm which combines haplotype clusterings with allelic dosages. Second, we introduce the new gene expression classification problem, which focuses on identifying expression groups rather than continuous measurements; we formalize the selection of an appropriate number of expression groups using the principle of maximum entropy. Third, we develop the HAPLEXD algorithm that models haplotype sharing with a modified suffix tree data structure and computes expression groups by spectral clustering. In both models, we penalize model complexity by prioritizing genetic clusters that indicate significant effects on expression. We compare HAPLEXR and HAPLEXD with three state-of-the-art expression prediction methods and two novel logistic regression approaches across five GTEx v8 tissues. HAPLEXD exhibits significantly higher classification accuracy overall; HAPLEXR shows higher prediction accuracy on approximately half of the genes tested and the largest number of best predicted genes (r2>0.1) among all methods. We show that variant and haplotype features selected by HAPLEXR are smaller in size than competing methods (and thus more interpretable) and are significantly enriched in functional annotations related to gene regulation. These results demonstrate the importance of explicitly modeling non-dosage dependent and intragenic epistatic effects when predicting expression. Availability and implementation Source code and binaries are freely available at https://github.com/rapturous/HAPLEX. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (19) ◽  
pp. 3701-3708 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gulnara R Svishcheva ◽  
Nadezhda M Belonogova ◽  
Irina V Zorkoltseva ◽  
Anatoly V Kirichenko ◽  
Tatiana I Axenovich

Abstract Motivation A huge number of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) summary statistics freely available in databases provide a new material for gene-based association analysis aimed at identifying rare genetic variants. Only a few of the many popular gene-based methods developed for individual genotype and phenotype data are adapted for the practical use of the GWAS summary statistics as input. Results We analytically prove and numerically illustrate that all popular powerful methods developed for gene-based association analysis of individual phenotype and genotype data can be modified to utilize GWAS summary statistics. We have modified and implemented all of the popular methods, including burden and kernel machine-based tests, multiple and functional linear regression, principal components analysis and others, in the R package sumFREGAT. Using real summary statistics for coronary artery disease, we show that the new package is able to detect genes not found by the existing packages. Availability and implementation The R package sumFREGAT is freely and publicly available at: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=sumFREGAT. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (22) ◽  
pp. 4724-4729 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wujuan Zhong ◽  
Cassandra N Spracklen ◽  
Karen L Mohlke ◽  
Xiaojing Zheng ◽  
Jason Fine ◽  
...  

Abstract Summary Tens of thousands of reproducibly identified GWAS (Genome-Wide Association Studies) variants, with the vast majority falling in non-coding regions resulting in no eventual protein products, call urgently for mechanistic interpretations. Although numerous methods exist, there are few, if any methods, for simultaneously testing the mediation effects of multiple correlated SNPs via some mediator (e.g. the expression of a gene in the neighborhood) on phenotypic outcome. We propose multi-SNP mediation intersection-union test (SMUT) to fill in this methodological gap. Our extensive simulations demonstrate the validity of SMUT as well as substantial, up to 92%, power gains over alternative methods. In addition, SMUT confirmed known mediators in a real dataset of Finns for plasma adiponectin level, which were missed by many alternative methods. We believe SMUT will become a useful tool to generate mechanistic hypotheses underlying GWAS variants, facilitating functional follow-up. Availability and implementation The R package SMUT is publicly available from CRAN at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=SMUT. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


Author(s):  
Alan E Murphy ◽  
Brian M Schilder ◽  
Nathan G Skene

Abstract Motivation Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) summary statistics have popularised and accelerated genetic research. However, a lack of standardisation of the file formats used has proven problematic when running secondary analysis tools or performing meta-analysis studies. Results To address this issue, we have developed MungeSumstats, a Bioconductor R package for the standardisation and quality control of GWAS summary statistics. MungeSumstats can handle the most common summary statistic formats, including variant call format (VCF) producing a reformatted, standardised, tabular summary statistic file, VCF or R native data object. Availability MungeSumstats is available on Bioconductor (v 3.13) and can also be found on Github at: https://neurogenomics.github.io/MungeSumstats Supplementary information The analysis deriving the most common summary statistic formats is available at: https://al-murphy.github.io/SumstatFormats


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janine Arloth ◽  
Gökcen Eraslan ◽  
Till F.M. Andlauer ◽  
Jade Martins ◽  
Stella Iurato ◽  
...  

AbstractGenome-wide association studies (GWAS) identify genetic variants associated with quantitative traits or disease. Thus, GWAS never directly link variants to regulatory mechanisms, which, in turn, are typically inferred during post-hoc analyses. In parallel, a recent deep learning-based method allows for prediction of regulatory effects per variant on currently up to 1,000 cell type-specific chromatin features. We here describe “DeepWAS”, a new approach that directly integrates predictions of these regulatory effects of single variants into a multivariate GWAS setting. As a result, single variants associated with a trait or disease are, by design, coupled to their impact on a chromatin feature in a cell type. Up to 40,000 regulatory single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were associated with multiple sclerosis (MS, 4,888 cases and 10,395 controls), major depressive disorder (MDD, 1,475 cases and 2,144 controls), and height (5,974 individuals) to each identify 43-61 regulatory SNPs, called deepSNPs, which are shown to reach at least nominal significance in large GWAS. MS- and height-specific deepSNPs resided in active chromatin and introns, whereas MDD-specific deepSNPs located mostly to intragenic regions and repressive chromatin states. We found deepSNPs to be enriched in public or cohort-matched expression and methylation quantitative trait loci and demonstrate the potential of the DeepWAS method to directly generate testable functional hypotheses based on genotype data alone. DeepWAS is an innovative GWAS approach with the power to identify individual SNPs in non-coding regions with gene regulatory capacity with a joint contribution to disease risk. DeepWAS is available at https://github.com/cellmapslab/DeepWAS.


2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (8) ◽  
pp. 2626-2627
Author(s):  
Corentin Molitor ◽  
Matt Brember ◽  
Fady Mohareb

Abstract Summary Over the past decade, there has been an exponential increase in the amount of disease-related genomic data available in public databases. However, this high-quality information is spread across independent sources and researchers often need to access these separately. Hence, there is a growing need for tools that gather and compile this information in an easy and automated manner. Here, we present ‘VarGen’, an easy-to-use, customizable R package that fetches, annotates and rank variants related to diseases and genetic disorders, using a collection public databases (viz. Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, the Functional Annotation of the Mammalian genome 5, the Genotype-Tissue Expression and the Genome Wide Association Studies catalog). This package is also capable of annotating these variants to identify the most impactful ones. We expect that this tool will benefit the research of variant-disease relationships. Availability and implementation VarGen is open-source and freely available via GitHub: https://github.com/MCorentin/VarGen. The software is implemented as an R package and is supported on Linux, MacOS and Windows. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (24) ◽  
pp. 5182-5190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis G Leal ◽  
Alessia David ◽  
Marjo-Riita Jarvelin ◽  
Sylvain Sebert ◽  
Minna Männikkö ◽  
...  

Abstract Motivation Integration of different omics data could markedly help to identify biological signatures, understand the missing heritability of complex diseases and ultimately achieve personalized medicine. Standard regression models used in Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) identify loci with a strong effect size, whereas GWAS meta-analyses are often needed to capture weak loci contributing to the missing heritability. Development of novel machine learning algorithms for merging genotype data with other omics data is highly needed as it could enhance the prioritization of weak loci. Results We developed cNMTF (corrected non-negative matrix tri-factorization), an integrative algorithm based on clustering techniques of biological data. This method assesses the inter-relatedness between genotypes, phenotypes, the damaging effect of the variants and gene networks in order to identify loci-trait associations. cNMTF was used to prioritize genes associated with lipid traits in two population cohorts. We replicated 129 genes reported in GWAS world-wide and provided evidence that supports 85% of our findings (226 out of 265 genes), including recent associations in literature (NLGN1), regulators of lipid metabolism (DAB1) and pleiotropic genes for lipid traits (CARM1). Moreover, cNMTF performed efficiently against strong population structures by accounting for the individuals’ ancestry. As the method is flexible in the incorporation of diverse omics data sources, it can be easily adapted to the user’s research needs. Availability and implementation An R package (cnmtf) is available at https://lgl15.github.io/cnmtf_web/index.html. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Milet ◽  
Hervé Perdry

AbstractMotivationMixed linear models (MLM) have been widely used to account for population structure in case-control genome-wide association studies, the status being analyzed as a quantitative phenotype. Chen et al. proved that this method is inappropriate and proposed a score test for the mixed logistic regression (MLR). However this test does not allow an estimation of the variants’ effects.ResultsWe propose two computationally efficient methods to estimate the variants’ effects. Their properties are evaluated on two simulations sets, and compared with other methods (MLM, logistic regression). MLR performs the best in all circumstances. The variants’ effects are well evaluated by our methods, with a moderate bias when the effect sizes are large. Additionally, we propose a stratified QQ-plot, enhancing the diagnosis of p-values inflation or deflation, when population strata are not clearly identified in the sample.AvailabilityAll methods are implemented in the R package milorGWAS available at https://github.com/genostats/[email protected] informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document