1. |
- Ramachandran, Sohini, et al.
(author)
-
Estimation of non-null SNP effect size distributions enables the detection of enriched genes underlying complex traits
- 2020
-
In: PLOS Genetics. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1553-7390 .- 1553-7404. ; 16:6
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Traditional univariate genome-wide association studies generate false positives and nega-tives due to difficulties distinguishing associated variants from variants with spurious non-zero effects that do not directly influence the trait. Recent efforts have been directed atidentifying genes or signaling pathways enriched for mutations in quantitative traits or case-control studies, but these can be computationally costly and hampered by strict modelassumptions. Here, we present gene-ε, a new approach for identifying statistical associa-tions between sets of variants and quantitative traits. Our key insight is that enrichment stud-ies on the gene-level are improved when we reformulate the genome-wide SNP-level nullhypothesis to identify spurious small-to-intermediate SNP effects and classify them as non-causal. gene-ε efficiently identifies enriched genes under a variety of simulated geneticarchitectures, achieving greater than a 90% true positive rate at 1% false positive rate forpolygenic traits. Lastly, we apply gene-ε to summary statistics derived from six quantitativetraits using European-ancestry individuals in the UK Biobank, and identify enriched genesthat are in biologically relevant pathways.
|
|