Detecting Gene-Gene Interactions Associated with Multiple Complex Traits with U-Statistics.

Detecting Gene-Gene Interactions Associated with Multiple Complex Traits with U-Statistics. Curr Genomics. 2016 Oct;17(5):403-415 Authors: Li M, Wei C, Wen Y, Wang T, Lu Q Abstract Many complex diseases, such as psychiatric and behavioral disorders, are commonly characterized through various measurements that reflect physical, behavioral and psychological aspects of diseases. While it remains a great challenge to find a unified measurement to characterize a disease, the available multiple phenotypes can be analyzed jointly in the genetic association study. Simultaneously testing these phenotypes has many advantages, including considering different aspects of the disease in the analysis, and utilizing correlated phenotypes to improve the power of detecting disease-associated variants. Furthermore, complex diseases are likely caused by the interplay of multiple genetic variants through complicated mechanisms. Considering gene-gene interactions in the joint association analysis of complex diseases could further increase our ability to discover genetic variants involving complex disease pathways. In this article, we propose a stepwise U-test for joint association analysis of multiple loci and multiple phenotypes. Through simulations, we demonstrated that testing multiple phenotypes simultaneously could attain higher power than testing one single phenotype at a time, especially when there are shared genes contributing to multiple phenotyp...
Source: Current Genomics - Category: Genetics & Stem Cells Tags: Curr Genomics Source Type: research