Integrating Gene Expression with Summary Association Statistics to Identify Genes Associated with 30 Complex Traits.

ABSTRACT: Although genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have identified thousands of risk loci for many complex traits and diseases, the causal variants and genes at these loci remain largely unknown. Here, we introduce a method for estimating the local genetic correlation between gene expression and a complex trait and utilize it to estimate the genetic correlation due to predicted expression between pairs of traits. We integrated gene expression measurements from 45 expression panels with summary GWAS data to perform 30 multi-tissue transcriptome-wide association studies (TWASs). We identified 1,196 genes whose expression is associated with these traits; of these, 168 reside more than 0.5 Mb away from any previously reported GWAS significant variant. We then used our approach to find 43 pairs o

SUBMITTER: Mancuso N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5339290 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature