scholarly journals Exploiting Homoplasy in Genome-Wide Association Studies to Enhance Identification of Antibiotic-Resistance Mutations in Bacterial Genomes

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 117693432094493
Author(s):  
Yi-Pin Lai ◽  
Thomas R Ioerger

Many antibacterial drugs have multiple mechanisms of resistance, which are often represented simultaneously by a mixture of resistance mutations (some more frequent than others) in a clinical population. This presents a challenge for Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) methods, making it difficult to detect less prevalent resistance mechanisms purely through (weak) statistical associations. Homoplasy, or the occurrence of multiple independent mutations at the same site, is often observed with drug resistance mutations and can be a strong indicator of positive selection. However, traditional GWAS methods, such as those based on allele counting or linear regression, are not designed to take homoplasy into account. In this article, we present a new method, called ECAT (for Evolutionary Cluster-based Association Test), that extends traditional regression-based GWAS methods with the ability to take advantage of homoplasy. This is achieved through a preprocessing step which identifies hypervariable regions in the genome exhibiting statistically significant clusters of distinct evolutionary changes, to which association testing by a linear mixed model (LMM) is applied using GEMMA (a well-established LMM-based GWAS tool). Thus, the approach can be viewed as extending GEMMA from the usual site- or gene-level analysis to focusing on clustered regions of mutations. This approach was evaluated on a large collection of more than 600 clinical isolates of multidrug-resistant (MDR) Mycobacterium tuberculosis from Lima, Peru. We show that ECAT does a better job of detecting known resistance mutations for several antitubercular drugs (including less prevalent mutations with weaker associations), compared with (site- or gene-based) GEMMA, as representative of existing GWAS methods. The power of the multiphase approach in ECAT comes from focusing association testing on the hypervariable regions of the genome, which reduces complexity in the model and increases statistical power.

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (14) ◽  
pp. 2512-2514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bongsong Kim ◽  
Xinbin Dai ◽  
Wenchao Zhang ◽  
Zhaohong Zhuang ◽  
Darlene L Sanchez ◽  
...  

Abstract Summary We present GWASpro, a high-performance web server for the analyses of large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS). GWASpro was developed to provide data analyses for large-scale molecular genetic data, coupled with complex replicated experimental designs such as found in plant science investigations and to overcome the steep learning curves of existing GWAS software tools. GWASpro supports building complex design matrices, by which complex experimental designs that may include replications, treatments, locations and times, can be accounted for in the linear mixed model. GWASpro is optimized to handle GWAS data that may consist of up to 10 million markers and 10 000 samples from replicable lines or hybrids. GWASpro provides an interface that significantly reduces the learning curve for new GWAS investigators. Availability and implementation GWASpro is freely available at https://bioinfo.noble.org/GWASPRO. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan A. Freudenthal ◽  
Markus J. Ankenbrand ◽  
Dominik G. Grimm ◽  
Arthur Korte

AbstractMotivationGenome-wide association studies (GWAS) are one of the most commonly used methods to detect associations between complex traits and genomic polymorphisms. As both genotyping and phenotyping of large populations has become easier, typical modern GWAS have to cope with massive amounts of data. Thus, the computational demand for these analyses grew remarkably during the last decades. This is especially true, if one wants to implement permutation-based significance thresholds, instead of using the naïve Bonferroni threshold. Permutation-based methods have the advantage to provide an adjusted multiple hypothesis correction threshold that takes the underlying phenotypic distribution into account and will thus remove the need to find the correct transformation for non Gaussian phenotypes. To enable efficient analyses of large datasets and the possibility to compute permutation-based significance thresholds, we used the machine learning framework TensorFlow to develop a linear mixed model (GWAS-Flow) that can make use of the available CPU or GPU infrastructure to decrease the time of the analyses especially for large datasets.ResultsWe were able to show that our application GWAS-Flow outperforms custom GWAS scripts in terms of speed without loosing accuracy. Apart from p-values, GWAS-Flow also computes summary statistics, such as the effect size and its standard error for each individual marker. The CPU-based version is the default choice for small data, while the GPU-based version of GWAS-Flow is especially suited for the analyses of big data.AvailabilityGWAS-Flow is freely available on GitHub (https://github.com/Joyvalley/GWAS_Flow) and is released under the terms of the MIT-License.


Animals ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 2009
Author(s):  
Ellen Lai ◽  
Alexa L. Danner ◽  
Thomas R. Famula ◽  
Anita M. Oberbauer

Digital dermatitis (DD) causes lameness in dairy cattle. To detect the quantitative trait loci (QTL) associated with DD, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) were performed using high-density single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotypes and binary case/control, quantitative (average number of FW per hoof trimming record) and recurrent (cases with ≥2 DD episodes vs. controls) phenotypes from cows across four dairies (controls n = 129 vs. FW n = 85). Linear mixed model (LMM) and random forest (RF) approaches identified the top SNPs, which were used as predictors in Bayesian regression models to assess the SNP predictive value. The LMM and RF analyses identified QTL regions containing candidate genes on Bos taurus autosome (BTA) 2 for the binary and recurrent phenotypes and BTA7 and 20 for the quantitative phenotype that related to epidermal integrity, immune function, and wound healing. Although larger sample sizes are necessary to reaffirm these small effect loci amidst a strong environmental effect, the sample cohort used in this study was sufficient for estimating SNP effects with a high predictive value.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haohan Wang ◽  
Bryon Aragam ◽  
Eric P. Xing

AbstractA fundamental and important challenge in modern datasets of ever increasing dimensionality is variable selection, which has taken on renewed interest recently due to the growth of biological and medical datasets with complex, non-i.i.d. structures. Naïvely applying classical variable selection methods such as the Lasso to such datasets may lead to a large number of false discoveries. Motivated by genome-wide association studies in genetics, we study the problem of variable selection for datasets arising from multiple subpopulations, when this underlying population structure is unknown to the researcher. We propose a unified framework for sparse variable selection that adaptively corrects for population structure via a low-rank linear mixed model. Most importantly, the proposed method does not require prior knowledge of sample structure in the data and adaptively selects a covariance structure of the correct complexity. Through extensive experiments, we illustrate the effectiveness of this framework over existing methods. Further, we test our method on three different genomic datasets from plants, mice, and human, and discuss the knowledge we discover with our method.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (23) ◽  
pp. 4879-4885 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chao Ning ◽  
Dan Wang ◽  
Lei Zhou ◽  
Julong Wei ◽  
Yuanxin Liu ◽  
...  

Abstract Motivation Current dynamic phenotyping system introduces time as an extra dimension to genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which helps to explore the mechanism of dynamical genetic control for complex longitudinal traits. However, existing methods for longitudinal GWAS either ignore the covariance among observations of different time points or encounter computational efficiency issues. Results We herein developed efficient genome-wide multivariate association algorithms for longitudinal data. In contrast to existing univariate linear mixed model analyses, the proposed method has improved statistic power for association detection and computational speed. In addition, the new method can analyze unbalanced longitudinal data with thousands of individuals and more than ten thousand records within a few hours. The corresponding time for balanced longitudinal data is just a few minutes. Availability and implementation A software package to implement the efficient algorithm named GMA (https://github.com/chaoning/GMA) is available freely for interested users in relevant fields. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


Author(s):  
Kristine A. Pattin ◽  
Jason H. Moore

Recent technological developments in the field of genetics have given rise to an abundance of research tools, such as genome-wide genotyping, that allow researchers to conduct genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for detecting genetic variants that confer increased or decreased susceptibility to disease. However, discovering epistatic, or gene-gene, interactions in high dimensional datasets is a problem due to the computational complexity that results from the analysis of all possible combinations of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A recently explored approach to this problem employs biological expert knowledge, such as pathway or protein-protein interaction information, to guide an analysis by the selection or weighting of SNPs based on this knowledge. Narrowing the evaluation to gene combinations that have been shown to interact experimentally provides a biologically concise reason why those two genes may be detected together statistically. This chapter discusses the challenges of discovering epistatic interactions in GWAS and how biological expert knowledge can be used to facilitate genome-wide genetic studies.


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