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1. Simultaneous detection of novel genes and SNPs by adaptive p-value combination

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2022.1009428  

   Chen, Xiaohui; Zhang, Hong; Liu, Ming; Deng, Hong-Wen; Wu, Zheyang (November 2022, Frontiers in Genetics)

   Combining SNP p -values from GWAS summary data is a promising strategy for detecting novel genetic factors. Existing statistical methods for the p -value-based SNP-set testing confront two challenges. First, the statistical power of different methods depends on unknown patterns of genetic effects that could drastically vary over different SNP sets. Second, they do not identify which SNPs primarily contribute to the global association of the whole set. We propose a new signal-adaptive analysis pipeline to address these challenges using the omnibus thresholding Fisher’s method (oTFisher). The oTFisher remains robustly powerful over various patterns of genetic effects. Its adaptive thresholding can be applied to estimate important SNPs contributing to the overall significance of the given SNP set. We develop efficient calculation algorithms to control the type I error rate, which accounts for the linkage disequilibrium among SNPs. Extensive simulations show that the oTFisher has robustly high power and provides a higher balanced accuracy in screening SNPs than the traditional Bonferroni and FDR procedures. We applied the oTFisher to study the genetic association of genes and haplotype blocks of the bone density-related traits using the summary data of the Genetic Factors for Osteoporosis Consortium. The oTFisher identified more novel and literature-reported genetic factors than existing p -value combination methods. Relevant computation has been implemented into the R package TFisher to support similar data analysis. 

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2. A multivariate to multivariate approach for voxel‐wise genome‐wide association analysis

   https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.10101  

   Wu, Qiong; Zhang, Yuan; Huang, Xiaoqi; Ma, Tianzhou; Hong, L Elliot; Kochunov, Peter; Chen, Shuo (August 2024, Statistics in Medicine)

   The joint analysis of imaging‐genetics data facilitates the systematic investigation of genetic effects on brain structures and functions with spatial specificity. We focus on voxel‐wise genome‐wide association analysis, which may involve trillions of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)‐voxel pairs. We attempt to identify underlying organized association patterns of SNP‐voxel pairs and understand the polygenic and pleiotropic networks on brain imaging traits. We propose abi‐cliquegraph structure (ie, a set of SNPs highly correlated with a cluster of voxels) for the systematic association pattern. Next, we develop computational strategies to detect latent SNP‐voxelbi‐cliquesand an inference model for statistical testing. We further provide theoretical results to guarantee the accuracy of our computational algorithms and statistical inference. We validate our method by extensive simulation studies, and then apply it to the whole genome genetic and voxel‐level white matter integrity data collected from 1052 participants of the human connectome project. The results demonstrate multiple genetic loci influencing white matter integrity measures on splenium and genu of the corpus callosum. 

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3. Simultaneous selection of multiple important single nucleotide polymorphisms in familial genome wide association studies data

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-35379-y  

   Majumdar, Subhabrata; Basu, Saonli; McGue, Matt; Chatterjee, Snigdhansu (December 2023, Scientific Reports)

   Abstract We propose a resampling-based fast variable selection technique for detecting relevant single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in a multi-marker mixed effect model. Due to computational complexity, current practice primarily involves testing the effect of one SNP at a time, commonly termed as ‘single SNP association analysis’. Joint modeling of genetic variants within a gene or pathway may have better power to detect associated genetic variants, especially the ones with weak effects. In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient model selection approach—based on the e-values framework—for single SNP detection in families while utilizing information on multiple SNPs simultaneously. To overcome computational bottleneck of traditional model selection methods, our method trains one single model, and utilizes a fast and scalable bootstrap procedure. We illustrate through numerical studies that our proposed method is more effective in detecting SNPs associated with a trait than either single-marker analysis using family data or model selection methods that ignore the familial dependency structure. Further, we perform gene-level analysis in Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research (MCTFR) dataset using our method to detect several SNPs using this that have been implicated to be associated with alcohol consumption. 

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4. Identifying genetic markers enriched by brain imaging endophenotypes in Alzheimer’s disease

   https://doi.org/10.1186/s12920-022-01323-8  

   Kim, Mansu; Wu, Ruiming; Yao, Xiaohui; Saykin, Andrew J.; Moore, Jason H.; Shen, Li (December 2022, BMC Medical Genomics)

   Abstract Background Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a complex neurodegenerative disorder and the most common type of dementia. AD is characterized by a decline of cognitive function and brain atrophy, and is highly heritable with estimated heritability ranging from 60 to 80 $$\%$$ % . The most straightforward and widely used strategy to identify AD genetic basis is to perform genome-wide association study (GWAS) of the case-control diagnostic status. These GWAS studies have identified over 50 AD related susceptibility loci. Recently, imaging genetics has emerged as a new field where brain imaging measures are studied as quantitative traits to detect genetic factors. Given that many imaging genetics studies did not involve the diagnostic outcome in the analysis, the identified imaging or genetic markers may not be related or specific to the disease outcome. Results We propose a novel method to identify disease-related genetic variants enriched by imaging endophenotypes, which are the imaging traits associated with both genetic factors and disease status. Our analysis consists of three steps: (1) map the effects of a genetic variant (e.g., single nucleotide polymorphism or SNP) onto imaging traits across the brain using a linear regression model, (2) map the effects of a diagnosis phenotype onto imaging traits across the brain using a linear regression model, and (3) detect SNP-diagnosis association via correlating the SNP effects with the diagnostic effects on the brain-wide imaging traits. We demonstrate the promise of our approach by applying it to the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database. Among 54 AD related susceptibility loci reported in prior large-scale AD GWAS, our approach identifies 41 of those from a much smaller study cohort while the standard association approaches identify only two of those. Clearly, the proposed imaging endophenotype enriched approach can reveal promising AD genetic variants undetectable using the traditional method. Conclusion We have proposed a novel method to identify AD genetic variants enriched by brain-wide imaging endophenotypes. This approach can not only boost detection power, but also reveal interesting biological pathways from genetic determinants to intermediate brain traits and to phenotypic AD outcomes. 

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5. Mining High-Level Imaging Genetic Associations via Clustering AD Candidate Variants with Similar Brain Association Patterns

   https://doi.org/10.3390/genes13091520  

   Wu, Ruiming; Bao, Jingxuan; Kim, Mansu; Saykin, Andrew J.; Moore, Jason H.; Shen, Li (September 2022, Genes)

   Brain imaging genetics examines associations between imaging quantitative traits (QTs) and genetic factors such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to provide important insights into the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The individual level SNP-QT signals are high dimensional and typically have small effect sizes, making them hard to be detected and replicated. To overcome this limitation, this work proposes a new approach that identifies high-level imaging genetic associations through applying multigraph clustering to the SNP-QT association maps. Given an SNP set and a brain QT set, the association between each SNP and each QT is evaluated using a linear regression model. Based on the resulting SNP-QT association map, five SNP–SNP similarity networks (or graphs) are created using five different scoring functions, respectively. Multigraph clustering is applied to these networks to identify SNP clusters with similar association patterns with all the brain QTs. After that, functional annotation is performed for each identified SNP cluster and its corresponding brain association pattern. We applied this pipeline to an AD imaging genetic study, which yielded promising results. For example, in an association study between 54 AD SNPs and 116 amyloid QTs, we identified two SNP clusters with one responsible for amyloid beta clearances and the other regulating amyloid beta formation. These high-level findings have the potential to provide valuable insights into relevant genetic pathways and brain circuits, which can help form new hypotheses for more detailed imaging and genetics studies in independent cohorts. 

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