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A pleiotropy-informed Bayesian false discovery rate adapted to a shared control design finds new disease associations from GWAS summary statistics.


Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Liley, James 

Abstract

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been successful in identifying single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with many traits and diseases. However, at existing sample sizes, these variants explain only part of the estimated heritability. Leverage of GWAS results from related phenotypes may improve detection without the need for larger datasets. The Bayesian conditional false discovery rate (cFDR) constitutes an upper bound on the expected false discovery rate (FDR) across a set of SNPs whose p values for two diseases are both less than two disease-specific thresholds. Calculation of the cFDR requires only summary statistics and have several advantages over traditional GWAS analysis. However, existing methods require distinct control samples between studies. Here, we extend the technique to allow for some or all controls to be shared, increasing applicability. Several different SNP sets can be defined with the same cFDR value, and we show that the expected FDR across the union of these sets may exceed expected FDR in any single set. We describe a procedure to establish an upper bound for the expected FDR among the union of such sets of SNPs. We apply our technique to pairwise analysis of p values from ten autoimmune diseases with variable sharing of controls, enabling discovery of 59 SNP-disease associations which do not reach GWAS significance after genomic control in individual datasets. Most of the SNPs we highlight have previously been confirmed using replication studies or larger GWAS, a useful validation of our technique; we report eight SNP-disease associations across five diseases not previously declared. Our technique extends and strengthens the previous algorithm, and establishes robust limits on the expected FDR. This approach can improve SNP detection in GWAS, and give insight into shared aetiology between phenotypically related conditions.

Description

Keywords

Autoimmune Diseases, Bayes Theorem, Diabetes Mellitus, Type 1, Genetic Predisposition to Disease, Genome, Human, Genome-Wide Association Study, Genotype, Humans, Liver Cirrhosis, Biliary, Phenotype, Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide

Journal Title

PLoS Genet

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1553-7390
1553-7404

Volume Title

11

Publisher

Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Sponsorship
Wellcome Trust (089989/Z/09/Z)
Wellcome Trust (076113/C/04/Z)
Wellcome Trust (100140/Z/12/Z)
European Commission (241447)
Wellcome Trust (061858/Z/00/E)
Wellcome Trust (091157/Z/10/B)
This work was funded by the JDRF (9-2011-253), the Wellcome Trust (061858 and 091157) and the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement no. 241447 (NAIMIT). JL is funded by the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre and is on the Wellcome Trust PhD programme in Mathematical Genomics and Medicine at the University of Cambridge. CW is funded by the Wellcome Trust (089989). The Cambridge Institute for Medical Research (CIMR) is in receipt of a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award (100140). ImmunoBase.org is supported by Eli-Lilly and Company. The use of DNA from the UK Blood Services collection of Common Controls (UKBS collection) was funded by the Wellcome Trust grant 076113/C/04/Z, by the Wellcome Trust/JDRF grant 061858, and by the National Institute of Health Research of England. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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