Best practices for multi-ancestry, meta-analytic transcriptome-wide association studies: Lessons from the Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative.

Abstract

The Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative (GBMI), through its diversity, provides a valuable opportunity to study population-wide and ancestry-specific genetic associations. However, with multiple ascertainment strategies and multi-ancestry study populations across biobanks, GBMI presents unique challenges in implementing statistical genetics methods. Transcriptome-wide association studies (TWASs) boost detection power for and provide biological context to genetic associations by integrating genetic variant-to-trait associations from genome-wide association studies (GWASs) with predictive models of gene expression. TWASs present unique challenges beyond GWASs, especially in a multi-biobank, meta-analytic setting. Here, we present the GBMI TWAS pipeline, outlining practical considerations for ancestry and tissue specificity, meta-analytic strategies, and open challenges at every step of the framework. We advise conducting ancestry-stratified TWASs using ancestry-specific expression models and meta-analyzing results using inverse-variance weighting, showing the least test statistic inflation. Our work provides a foundation for adding transcriptomic context to biobank-linked GWASs, allowing for ancestry-aware discovery to accelerate genomic medicine.