Author : Kunling Huang
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (14 download)
Book Synopsis Statistical Methods for Integrating Quantitative Trait Loci Annotation in Post-gwas Analysis by : Kunling Huang
Download or read book Statistical Methods for Integrating Quantitative Trait Loci Annotation in Post-gwas Analysis written by Kunling Huang and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent advances in large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have highlighted the involvement of common genetic variants in complex traits and diseases. Data integration efforts linking GWAS signals with functional annotation data have provided insights into the genetic architecture of numerous human complex traits. For example, expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) studies in relevant biological tissues provide gene candidates for complex diseases, which can be tested as therapeutic targets. Integrating multi-omics annotation data with GWAS association data brings in orthogonal information and improves the understanding of complex trait etiology. In this dissertation, we present two approaches to link genomic annotations to genotype-phenotype associations identified through GWAS. The two approaches both associate complex traits with genetically imputed molecular traits (i.e., gene expression levels and metabolite levels), and identify regulatory and metabolic machineries underlying a variety of complex traits.We start with integrating eQTLs with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in parent-offspring trios by quantifying the transmission disequilibrium of genetically regulated gene expression from parents to offspring and performing transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS). We identify transcription factor POU3F2 in our analysis. POU3F2 mainly expresses in developmental brain and the gene targets regulated by POU3F2 are enriched for known risk genes for ASD and loss-of-function de novo mutations in ASD probands. TWAS suggests that ASD genes affected by very rare mutations may be regulated by an unlinked transcription factor affected by common genetic variations. Next, we extend our TWAS framework to study the regulatory roles of metabolite quantitative trait loci (mQTL). We introduce metabolome-wide association study (MWAS), which integrates metabolomics data with genetics data. We benchmarked and optimized genetic prediction models for a total of 703 metabolites from cerebrospinal fluid, plasma, and urine, and performed a biobank-wide association scan between imputed metabolite levels and 530 complex traits in UK Biobank. We found a total of 1,311 significant metabolite-trait associations after performing Bonferroni correction across all tested associations. The significant MWAS results explain the difference in human body fat mass and body fat-free mass. In summary, we perform joint analysis on eQTL/mQTL data and complex trait GWAS to identify genes or metabolites relevant to complex traits. Our approaches improve our understanding of the phenotypic outcomes of non-coding genetic variations and may contribute to novel biomarker discovery, clinical diagnosis improvement, and therapeutics development.