Fast Genome-Wide QTL Association Mapping on Pedigree and Population Data

Since most analysis software for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) currently exploit only unrelated individuals, there is a need for efficient applications that can handle general pedigree data or mixtures of both population and pedigree data. Even data sets thought to consist of only unrelated individuals may include cryptic relationships that can lead to false positives if not discovered and controlled for. In addition, family designs possess compelling advantages. They are better equipped to detect rare variants, control for population stratification, and facilitate the study of parent-of-origin effects. Pedigrees selected for extreme trait values often segregate a single gene with strong effect. Finally, many pedigrees are available as an important legacy from the era of linkage analysis. Unfortunately, pedigree likelihoods are notoriously hard to compute. In this paper we re-examine the computational bottlenecks and implement ultra-fast pedigree-based GWAS analysis. Kinship coefficients can either be based on explicitly provided pedigrees or automatically estimated from dense markers. Our strategy (a) works for random sample data, pedigree data, or a mix of both; (b) entails no loss of power; (c) allows for any number of covariate adjustments, including correction for population stratification; (d) allows for testing SNPs under additive, dominant, and recessive models; and (e) accommodates both univariate and multivariate quantitative traits. On a typical personal computer (6 CPU cores at 2.67 GHz), analyzing a univariate HDL (high-density lipoprotein) trait from the San Antonio Family Heart Study (935,392 SNPs on 1357 individuals in 124 pedigrees) takes less than 2 minutes and 1.5 GB of memory. Complete multivariate QTL analysis of the three time-points of the longitudinal HDL multivariate trait takes less than 5 minutes and 1.5 GB of memory

Multiple testing correction in linear mixed models.

BackgroundMultiple hypothesis testing is a major issue in genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which often analyze millions of markers. The permutation test is considered to be the gold standard in multiple testing correction as it accurately takes into account the correlation structure of the genome. Recently, the linear mixed model (LMM) has become the standard practice in GWAS, addressing issues of population structure and insufficient power. However, none of the current multiple testing approaches are applicable to LMM.ResultsWe were able to estimate per-marker thresholds as accurately as the gold standard approach in real and simulated datasets, while reducing the time required from months to hours. We applied our approach to mouse, yeast, and human datasets to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our approach.ConclusionsWe provide an efficient and accurate multiple testing correction approach for linear mixed models. We further provide an intuition about the relationships between per-marker threshold, genetic relatedness, and heritability, based on our observations in real data

Population Structure and Cryptic Relatedness in Genetic Association Studies

We review the problem of confounding in genetic association studies, which arises principally because of population structure and cryptic relatedness. Many treatments of the problem consider only a simple ``island'' model of population structure. We take a broader approach, which views population structure and cryptic relatedness as different aspects of a single confounder: the unobserved pedigree defining the (often distant) relationships among the study subjects. Kinship is therefore a central concept, and we review methods of defining and estimating kinship coefficients, both pedigree-based and marker-based. In this unified framework we review solutions to the problem of population structure, including family-based study designs, genomic control, structured association, regression control, principal components adjustment and linear mixed models. The last solution makes the most explicit use of the kinships among the study subjects, and has an established role in the analysis of animal and plant breeding studies. Recent computational developments mean that analyses of human genetic association data are beginning to benefit from its powerful tests for association, which protect against population structure and cryptic kinship, as well as intermediate levels of confounding by the pedigree.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-STS307 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Genome-Wide Association and Linkage Analysis of Quantitative Traits: Comparison pf Likelihood-Ratio Test and Conditional Score Statistic

Over the past decade, genetic analysis has shifted from linkage studies, which identify broad regions containing putative trait loci, to genome-wide association studies, which detect the association of a marker with a specific phenotype. Because linkage and association analysis provide complementary information, developing a method to combine these analyses may increase the power to detect a true association. In this paper we compare a linkage score and association score test as well as a newly proposed combination of these two scores with traditional linkage and association methods.National Institutes of Health (National Institute of General Medical Sciences R01 GM031575, National Center for Research Resources Shared Instrumentation grant 1S10RR163736-01A1

Predicted Residual Error Sum of Squares of Mixed Models: An Application for Genomic Prediction.

Genomic prediction is a statistical method to predict phenotypes of polygenic traits using high-throughput genomic data. Most diseases and behaviors in humans and animals are polygenic traits. The majority of agronomic traits in crops are also polygenic. Accurate prediction of these traits can help medical professionals diagnose acute diseases and breeders to increase food products, and therefore significantly contribute to human health and global food security. The best linear unbiased prediction (BLUP) is an important tool to analyze high-throughput genomic data for prediction. However, to judge the efficacy of the BLUP model with a particular set of predictors for a given trait, one has to provide an unbiased mechanism to evaluate the predictability. Cross-validation (CV) is an essential tool to achieve this goal, where a sample is partitioned into K parts of roughly equal size, one part is predicted using parameters estimated from the remaining K - 1 parts, and eventually every part is predicted using a sample excluding that part. Such a CV is called the K-fold CV. Unfortunately, CV presents a substantial increase in computational burden. We developed an alternative method, the HAT method, to replace CV. The new method corrects the estimated residual errors from the whole sample analysis using the leverage values of a hat matrix of the random effects to achieve the predicted residual errors. Properties of the HAT method were investigated using seven agronomic and 1000 metabolomic traits of an inbred rice population. Results showed that the HAT method is a very good approximation of the CV method. The method was also applied to 10 traits in 1495 hybrid rice with 1.6 million SNPs, and to human height of 6161 subjects with roughly 0.5 million SNPs of the Framingham heart study data. Predictabilities of the HAT and CV methods were all similar. The HAT method allows us to easily evaluate the predictabilities of genomic prediction for large numbers of traits in very large populations