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Haplotype-based methods for detecting uncommon causal variants with common SNPs.

ABSTRACT: Detecting uncommon causal variants (minor allele frequency [MAF] < 5%) is difficult with commercial single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays that are designed to capture common variants (MAF > 5%). Haplotypes can provide insights into underlying linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure and can tag uncommon variants that are not well tagged by common variants. In this work, we propose a wei-SIMc-matching test that inversely weights haplotype similarities with the estimated standard deviation of haplotype counts to boost the power of similarity-based approaches for detecting uncommon causal variants. We then compare the power of the wei-SIMc-matching test with that of several popular haplotype-based tests, including four other similarity-based tests, a global score test for haplotypes (global), a test based on the maximum score statistic over all haplotypes (max), and two newly proposed haplotype-based tests for rare variant detection. With systematic simulations under a wide range of LD patterns, the results show that wei-SIMc-matching and global are the two most powerful tests. Among these two tests, wei-SIMc-matching has reliable asymptotic P-values, whereas global needs permutations to obtain reliable P-values when the frequencies of some haplotype categories are low or when the trait is skewed. Therefore, we recommend wei-SIMc-matching for detecting uncommon causal variants with surrounding common SNPs, in light of its power and computational feasibility.

SUBMITTER: Lin WY

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3513398 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Haplotype-based methods for detecting uncommon causal variants with common SNPs.

Lin Wan-Yu WY Yi Nengjun N Zhi Degui D Zhang Kui K Gao Guimin G Tiwari Hemant K HK Liu Nianjun N

Genetic epidemiology 20120615 6

Detecting uncommon causal variants (minor allele frequency [MAF] < 5%) is difficult with commercial single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays that are designed to capture common variants (MAF > 5%). Haplotypes can provide insights into underlying linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure and can tag uncommon variants that are not well tagged by common variants. In this work, we propose a wei-SIMc-matching test that inversely weights haplotype similarities with the estimated standard deviation of h ...[more]

PMID: 22706849

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Project description:BACKGROUND: Detecting epistatic interactions associated with complex and common diseases can help to improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment of these diseases. With the development of genome-wide association studies (GWAS), designing powerful and robust computational method for identifying epistatic interactions associated with common diseases becomes a great challenge to bioinformatics society, because the study of epistatic interactions often deals with the large size of the genotyped data and the huge amount of combinations of all the possible genetic factors. Most existing computational detection methods are based on the classification capacity of SNP sets, which may fail to identify SNP sets that are strongly associated with the diseases and introduce a lot of false positives. In addition, most methods are not suitable for genome-wide scale studies due to their computational complexity. RESULTS: We propose a new Markov Blanket-based method, DASSO-MB (Detection of ASSOciations using Markov Blanket) to detect epistatic interactions in case-control GWAS. Markov blanket of a target variable T can completely shield T from all other variables. Thus, we can guarantee that the SNP set detected by DASSO-MB has a strong association with diseases and contains fewest false positives. Furthermore, DASSO-MB uses a heuristic search strategy by calculating the association between variables to avoid the time-consuming training process as in other machine-learning methods. We apply our algorithm to simulated datasets and a real case-control dataset. We compare DASSO-MB to other commonly-used methods and show that our method significantly outperforms other methods and is capable of finding SNPs strongly associated with diseases. CONCLUSIONS: Our study shows that DASSO-MB can identify a minimal set of causal SNPs associated with diseases, which contains less false positives compared to other existing methods. Given the huge size of genomic dataset produced by GWAS, this is critical in saving the potential costs of biological experiments and being an efficient guideline for pathogenesis research.

Project description:BackgroundBoth common and rare genetic variants have been shown to contribute to the etiology of complex diseases. Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have successfully investigated how common variants contribute to the genetic factors associated with common human diseases. However, understanding the impact of rare variants, which are abundant in the human population (one in every 17 bases), remains challenging. A number of statistical tests have been developed to analyze collapsed rare variants identified by association tests. Here, we propose a haplotype-based approach. This work inspired by an existing statistical framework of the pedigree disequilibrium test (PDT), which uses genetic data to assess the effects of variants in general pedigrees. We aim to compare the performance between the haplotype-based approach and the rare variant-based approach for detecting rare causal variants in pedigrees.ResultsExtensive simulations in the sequencing setting were carried out to evaluate and compare the haplotype-based approach with the rare variant methods that drew on a more conventional collapsing strategy. As assessed through a variety of scenarios, the haplotype-based pedigree tests had enhanced statistical power compared with the rare variants based pedigree tests when the disease of interest was mainly caused by rare haplotypes (with multiple rare alleles), and vice versa when disease was caused by rare variants acting independently. For most of other situations when disease was caused both by haplotypes with multiple rare alleles and by rare variants with similar effects, these two approaches provided similar power in testing for association.ConclusionsThe haplotype-based approach was designed to assess the role of rare and potentially causal haplotypes. The proposed rare variants-based pedigree tests were designed to assess the role of rare and potentially causal variants. This study clearly documented the situations under which either method performs better than the other. All tests have been implemented in a software, which was submitted to the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) for general use as a computer program named rvHPDT.

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Haplotype-based methods for detecting uncommon causal variants with common SNPs.

Publications

Haplotype-based methods for detecting uncommon causal variants with common SNPs.

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