Joint analysis of functional genomic data and genome-wide association studies of 18 human traits

Annotations of gene structures and regulatory elements can inform genome-wide association studies (GWAS). However, choosing the relevant annotations for interpreting an association study of a given trait remains challenging. We describe a statistical model that uses association statistics computed across the genome to identify classes of genomic element that are enriched or depleted for loci that influence a trait. The model naturally incorporates multiple types of annotations. We applied the model to GWAS of 18 human traits, including red blood cell traits, platelet traits, glucose levels, lipid levels, height, BMI, and Crohn’s disease. For each trait, we evaluated the relevance of 450 different genomic annotations, including protein-coding genes, enhancers, and DNase-I hypersensitive sites in over a hundred tissues and cell lines. We show that the fraction of phenotype-associated SNPs that influence protein sequence ranges from around 2% (for platelet volume) up to around 20% (for LDL cholesterol); that repressed chromatin is significantly depleted for SNPs associated with several traits; and that cell type-specific DNase-I hypersensitive sites are enriched for SNPs associated with several traits (for example, the spleen in platelet volume). Finally, by re-weighting each GWAS using information from functional genomics, we increase the number of loci with high-confidence associations by around 5%.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  bioRxiv

• Publication date

  2013-11-19

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1101/000752arXiv 1311.4843PMID 24702953PMCID PMC3980523
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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