scholarly journals Multivariate genome wide association and network analysis of subcortical imaging phenotypes in Alzheimer’s disease

BMC Genomics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (S11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xianglian Meng ◽  
◽  
Jin Li ◽  
Qiushi Zhang ◽  
Feng Chen ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified many individual genes associated with brain imaging quantitative traits (QTs) in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However single marker level association discovery may not be able to address the underlying biological interactions with disease mechanism. Results In this paper, we used the MGAS (Multivariate Gene-based Association test by extended Simes procedure) tool to perform multivariate GWAS on eight AD-relevant subcortical imaging measures. We conducted multiple iPINBPA (integrative Protein-Interaction-Network-Based Pathway Analysis) network analyses on MGAS findings using protein-protein interaction (PPI) data, and identified five Consensus Modules (CMs) from the PPI network. Functional annotation and network analysis were performed on the identified CMs. The MGAS yielded significant hits within APOE, TOMM40 and APOC1 genes, which were known AD risk factors, as well as a few new genes such as LAMA1, XYLB, HSD17B7P2, and NPEPL1. The identified five CMs were enriched by biological processes related to disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Legionellosis, Pertussis, and Serotonergic synapse. Conclusions The statistical power of coupling MGAS with iPINBPA was higher than traditional GWAS method, and yielded new findings that were missed by GWAS. This study provides novel insights into the molecular mechanism of Alzheimer’s Disease and will be of value to novel gene discovery and functional genomic studies.

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (S23) ◽  
Author(s):  
Haohan Wang ◽  
Tianwei Yue ◽  
Jingkang Yang ◽  
Wei Wu ◽  
Eric P. Xing

Abstract Background Genome-wide Association Studies (GWAS) have contributed to unraveling associations between genetic variants in the human genome and complex traits for more than a decade. While many works have been invented as follow-ups to detect interactions between SNPs, epistasis are still yet to be modeled and discovered more thoroughly. Results In this paper, following the previous study of detecting marginal epistasis signals, and motivated by the universal approximation power of deep learning, we propose a neural network method that can potentially model arbitrary interactions between SNPs in genetic association studies as an extension to the mixed models in correcting confounding factors. Our method, namely Deep Mixed Model, consists of two components: 1) a confounding factor correction component, which is a large-kernel convolution neural network that focuses on calibrating the residual phenotypes by removing factors such as population stratification, and 2) a fixed-effect estimation component, which mainly consists of an Long-short Term Memory (LSTM) model that estimates the association effect size of SNPs with the residual phenotype. Conclusions After validating the performance of our method using simulation experiments, we further apply it to Alzheimer’s disease data sets. Our results help gain some explorative understandings of the genetic architecture of Alzheimer’s disease.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet C. Harwood ◽  
Ganna Leonenko ◽  
Rebecca Sims ◽  
Valentina Escott-Price ◽  
Julie Williams ◽  
...  

AbstractMore than 50 genetic loci have been identified as being associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and many of these are involved in immune pathways and lipid metabolism. Therefore, we performed a transcriptome-wide association study (TWAS) of immune-relevant cells, to study the mis-regulation of genes implicated in AD. We used expression and genetic data from naive and induced CD14+ monocytes and two GWAS of AD to study genetically controlled gene expression in monocytes at different stages of differentiation and compared the results with those from TWAS of brain and blood. We identified nine genes with statistically independent TWAS signals, seven are known AD risk genes from GWAS: BIN1, PTK2B, SPI1, MS4A4A, MS4A6E, APOE and PVR and two, LACTB2 and PLIN2/ADRP, are novel candidate genes for AD. Three genes, SPI1, PLIN2 and LACTB2, are TWAS significant specifically in monocytes. LACTB2 is a mitochondrial endoribonuclease and PLIN2/ADRP associates with intracellular neutral lipid storage droplets (LSDs) which have been shown to play a role in the regulation of the immune response. Notably, LACTB2 and PLIN2 were not detected from GWAS alone.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document