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ABSTRACT: When dense markers are available, one can interrogate almost every common variant across the genome via imputation and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) test, which has become a routine in current genome-wide association studies (GWASs). As a complement, admixture mapping exploits the long-range linkage disequilibrium (LD) generated by admixture between genetically distinct ancestral populations. It is then questionable whether admixture mapping analysis is still necessary in detecting the disease associated variants in admixed populations. We argue that admixture mapping is able to reduce the burden of massive comparisons in GWASs; it therefore can be a powerful tool to locate the disease variants with substantial allele frequency differences between ancestral populations. In this report we studied a two-stage approach, where candidate regions are defined by conducting admixture mapping at stage 1, and single SNP association tests are followed at stage 2 within the candidate regions defined at stage 1. We first established the genome-wide significance levels corresponding to the criteria to define the candidate regions at stage 1 by simulations. We next compared the power of the two-stage approach with direct association analysis. Our simulations suggest that the two-stage approach can be more powerful than the standard genome-wide association analysis when the allele frequency difference of a causal variant in ancestral populations, is larger than 0.4. Our conclusion is consistent with a theoretical prediction by Risch and Tang ([2006] Am J Hum Genet 79:S254). Surprisingly, our study also suggests that power can be improved when we use less strict criteria to define the candidate regions at stage 1.
Genetic Epidemiology 03/2012; 36(3):235-43. · 3.44 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: In genetic association studies, it is necessary to correct for population structure to avoid inference bias. During the past decade, prevailing corrections often only involved adjustments of global ancestry differences between sampled individuals. Nevertheless, population structure may vary across local genomic regions due to the variability of local ancestries associated with natural selection, migration, or random genetic drift. Adjusting for global ancestry alone may be inadequate when local population structure is an important confounding factor. In contrast, adjusting for local ancestry can more effectively prevent false-positives due to local population structure. To more accurately locate disease genes, we recommend adjusting for local ancestries by interrogating local structure. In practice, locus-specific ancestries are usually unknown and cannot be accurately inferred when ancestral population information is not available. For such scenarios, we propose employing local principal components (PC) to represent local ancestries and adjusting for local PCs when testing for genotype-phenotype association. With an acceptable computation burden, the proposed algorithm successfully eliminates the known spurious association between SNPs in the LCT gene and height due to the population structure in European Americans.
Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) 01/2012; 850:399-409.
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ABSTRACT: We found from our analysis of the Genetic Analysis Workshop 17 data that the population structure of the 697 unrelated individuals was an important confounding factor for association studies, even if it was not explicitly considered when simulating the phenotypes. We uncovered structures beyond the reported ethnicities and found ample evidence of phenotype-population structure associations. The first 10 principal components of the genotype data of the 697 individuals demonstrated much stronger associations with Q1, Q2, and the disease than did the individuals' ethnicities. In addition, we observed that population structure was a confounding factor for the Q1-gene association when identifying the significant genes both with and without adjusting for the causal single-nucleotide polymorphisms, the ethnicities, and the principal components. Many false discoveries remained after adjusting for the causal single-nucleotide polymorphisms. Adjusting for the principal components appeared more effective than did adjusting for ethnicity in terms of preventing false discoveries. This analysis was performed with knowledge of the causal loci.
BMC proceedings 11/2011; 5 Suppl 9:S25.
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ABSTRACT: For the family data from Genetic Analysis Workshop 17, we obtained heritability estimates of quantitative traits Q1 and Q4 using the ASSOC program in the S.A.G.E. software package. ASSOC is a family-based method that estimates heritability through the estimation of variance components. The covariate-adjusted mean heritability was 0.650 for Q1 and 0.745 for Q4. For the unrelated individuals data, we estimated the heritability of Q1 as the proportion of total variance that can be accounted for by all single-nucleotide polymorphisms under an additive model. We examined a novel ordinary least-squares method, a naïve restricted maximum-likelihood method, and a calibrated restricted maximum-likelihood method. We applied the different methods to all 200 replicates for Q1. We observed that the ordinary least-squares method yielded many estimates outside the interval [0, 1]. The restricted maximum-likelihood estimates were more stable than the ordinary least-squares estimates. The naïve restricted maximum-likelihood method yielded an average estimate of 0.462 ± 0.1, and the calibrated restricted maximum-likelihood method yielded an average of 0.535 ± 0.121. Our results demonstrate discrepancies in heritability estimates using the family data and the unrelated individuals data.
BMC proceedings 11/2011; 5 Suppl 9:S34.
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ABSTRACT: Gene-based and single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) set association studies provide an important complement to SNP analysis. Kernel-based nonparametric regression has recently emerged as a powerful and flexible tool for this purpose. Our goal is to explore whether this approach can be extended to incorporate and test for interaction effects, especially for genes containing rare variant SNPs. Here, we construct nonparametric regression models that can be used to include a gene-environment interaction effect under the framework of the least-squares kernel machine and examine the performance of the proposed method on the Genetic Analysis Workshop 17 unrelated individuals data set. Two hundred simulated replicates were used to explore the power for detecting interaction. We demonstrate through a genome scan of the quantitative phenotype Q1 that the simulated gene-environment interaction effect in the data can be detected with reasonable power by using the least-squares kernel machine method.
BMC proceedings 11/2011; 5 Suppl 9:S26.
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ABSTRACT: MOTIVATION: Admixed populations offer a unique opportunity for mapping diseases that have large disease allele frequency differences between ancestral populations. However, association analysis in such populations is challenging because population stratification may lead to association with loci unlinked to the disease locus. Methods and results: We show that local ancestry at a test single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) may confound with the association signal and ignoring it can lead to spurious association. We demonstrate theoretically that adjustment for local ancestry at the test SNP is sufficient to remove the spurious association regardless of the mechanism of population stratification, whether due to local or global ancestry differences among study subjects; however, global ancestry adjustment procedures may not be effective. We further develop two novel association tests that adjust for local ancestry. Our first test is based on a conditional likelihood framework which models the distribution of the test SNP given disease status and flanking marker genotypes. A key advantage of this test lies in its ability to incorporate different directions of association in the ancestral populations. Our second test, which is computationally simpler, is based on logistic regression, with adjustment for local ancestry proportion. We conducted extensive simulations and found that the Type I error rates of our tests are under control; however, the global adjustment procedures yielded inflated Type I error rates when stratification is due to local ancestry difference.
Bioinformatics 03/2011; 27(5):670-7. · 5.47 Impact Factor
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Bamidele O Tayo,
Marie Teil,
Liping Tong, Huaizhen Qin,
Gregory Khitrov,
Weijia Zhang,
Quinbin Song,
Omri Gottesman,
Xiaofeng Zhu,
Alexandre C Pereira,
Richard S Cooper,
Erwin P Bottinger
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ABSTRACT: The rapid progress currently being made in genomic science has created interest in potential clinical applications; however, formal translational research has been limited thus far. Studies of population genetics have demonstrated substantial variation in allele frequencies and haplotype structure at loci of medical relevance and the genetic background of patient cohorts may often be complex.
To describe the heterogeneity in an unselected clinical sample we used the Affymetrix 6.0 gene array chip to genotype self-identified European Americans (N = 326), African Americans (N = 324) and Hispanics (N = 327) from the medical practice of Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, NY. Additional data from US minority groups and Brazil were used for external comparison. Substantial variation in ancestral origin was observed for both African Americans and Hispanics; data from the latter group overlapped with both Mexican Americans and Brazilians in the external data sets. A pooled analysis of the African Americans and Hispanics from NY demonstrated a broad continuum of ancestral origin making classification by race/ethnicity uninformative. Selected loci harboring variants associated with medical traits and drug response confirmed substantial within- and between-group heterogeneity.
As a consequence of these complementary levels of heterogeneity group labels offered no guidance at the individual level. These findings demonstrate the complexity involved in clinical translation of the results from genome-wide association studies and suggest that in the genomic era conventional racial/ethnic labels are of little value.
PLoS ONE 01/2011; 6(5):e19166. · 4.09 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Adjustment for population structure is necessary to avoid bias in genetic association studies of susceptibility variants for complex diseases. Population structure may differ from one genomic region to another due to the variability of individual ancestry associated with migration, random genetic drift or natural selection. Current association methods for correcting population stratification usually involve adjustment of global ancestry between study subjects.
We suggest interrogating local population structure for fine mapping to more accurately locate true casual genes by better adjusting the confounding effect due to local ancestry. By extensive simulations on genome-wide datasets, we show that adjusting global ancestry may lead to false positives when local population structure is an important confounding factor. In contrast, adjusting local ancestry can effectively prevent false positives due to local population structure and thus can improve fine mapping for disease gene localization. We applied the local and global adjustments to the analysis of datasets from three genome-wide association studies, including European Americans, African Americans and Nigerians. Both European Americans and African Americans demonstrate greater variability in local ancestry than Nigerians. Adjusting local ancestry successfully eliminated the known spurious association between SNPs in the LCT gene and height due to the population structure existed in European Americans.
xiaofeng.zhu@case.edu
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Bioinformatics 09/2010; 26(23):2961-8. · 5.47 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Recently, Steen et al proposed a novel two-stage approach for family-based genome-wide association studies. In the first stage, a test based on between-family information is used to rank SNPs according to their P-values or conditional power of the test. In the second stage, the R most promising SNPs are tested using a family-based association test. We call this two-stage approach top R method. Ionita-Laza et al proposed an exponential weighting method within a two-stage framework. In the second stage of this approach, instead of testing top R SNPs, it tests all SNPs and weights the P-values of association test according to the information of the first stage. However, both of the top R and exponential weighting methods only use the information from the first stage to rank SNPs. It seems that the two methods do not use information from the first stage efficiently. Furthermore, it may be unreasonable for the exponential weighting method to use the same weight for all SNPs within a group when only one or a few SNPs are related with a disease. In this article, we propose a data-driven weighting scheme within a two-stage framework. In this method, we use the information from the first stage to determine a SNP-specific weight for each SNP. We use simulation studies to evaluate the performance of our method. The simulation results showed that our proposed method is consistently more powerful than the top R method and the exponential weighting method, regardless of the LD structure, population structure, and family structure.
European journal of human genetics: EJHG 11/2009; 18(5):596-603. · 3.56 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: ABSTRACT : In genome-wide association studies, new schemes are needed to incorporate multiple-locus information. In this article, we proposed a two-stage sliding-window approach to detect associations between a disease and multiple genetic polymorphisms. In the proposed approach, we measured the genetic association between a disease and a single-nucleotide polymorphism window by the newly developed likelihood ratio test-principal components statistic, and performed a sliding-window technique to detect disease susceptibility windows. We split the whole sample into two sub-samples, each of which contained a portion of cases and controls. In the first stage, we selected the top R windows by the statistics based on the first sub-sample, and in the second stage, we claimed significant windows by false-discovery rate correction on the p-values of the statistics based on the second sub-sample. By applying the new approach to the Genetic Analysis Workshop 16 Problem 1 data set, we detected 212 out of 531,601 windows to be responsible for rheumatoid arthritis. Except for chromosomes 4 and 18, each of the other 20 autosomes was found to harbor risk windows. Our results supported the findings of some rheumatoid arthritis susceptibility genes identified in the literature. In addition, we identified several new single-nucleotide polymorphism windows for follow-up studies.
BMC proceedings 01/2009; 3 Suppl 7:S28.
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ABSTRACT: Microarray experiments typically analyze thousands to tens of thousands of genes from small numbers of biological replicates. The fact that genes are normally expressed in functionally relevant patterns suggests that gene-expression data can be stratified and clustered into relatively homogenous groups. Cluster-wise dimensionality reduction should make it feasible to improve screening power while minimizing information loss.
We propose a powerful and computationally simple method for finding differentially expressed genes in small microarray experiments. The method incorporates a novel stratification-based tight clustering algorithm, principal component analysis and information pooling. Comprehensive simulations show that our method is substantially more powerful than the popular SAM and eBayes approaches. We applied the method to three real microarray datasets: one from a Populus nitrogen stress experiment with 3 biological replicates; and two from public microarray datasets of human cancers with 10 to 40 biological replicates. In all three analyses, our method proved more robust than the popular alternatives for identification of differentially expressed genes.
The C++ code to implement the proposed method is available upon request for academic use.
Bioinformatics 08/2008; 24(14):1583-9. · 5.47 Impact Factor
