Two-phase SSU and SKAT in genetic association studies

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Date
2020-01
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Indian Academy of Sciences
Abstract
The sum of squared score (SSU) and sequence kernel association test (SKAT) are the two good alternative tests for genetic association studies in case–control data. Both SSU and SKAT are derived through assuming a dose-response model between the risk of disease and genotypes. However, in practice, the real genetic mode of inheritance is impossible to know. Thus, these two tests might lose power substantially as shown in simulation results when the genetic model is misspecified. Here, to make both the tests suitable in broad situations, we propose two-phase SSU (tpSSU) and two-phase SKAT (tpSKAT), where the Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium test is adopted to choose the genetic model in the first phase and the SSU and SKAT are constructed corresponding to the selected genetic model in the second phase. We found that both tpSSU and tpSKAT outperformed the original SSU and SKAT in most of our simulation scenarios. By applying tpSSU and tpSKAT to the study of type 2 diabetes data, we successfully identified some genes that have direct effects on obesity. Besides, we also detected the significant chromosomal region 10q21.22 in GAW16 rheumatoid arthritis dataset, with P \10-6 . These findings suggest that tpSSU and tpSKAT can be effective in identifying genetic variants for complex diseases in case–control association studies
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Keywords
multiple-markers analysis, genetic model, Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium, power
Citation
Xue Yuan, Ding Juan, Wang Jinjuan, Zhang Sanguo, Pan Dongdong. Two-phase SSU and SKAT in genetic association studies. Journal of Genetics. 2020 Jan; 99: 1-10