Although many genetic factors have been successfully identified for human diseases in genome-wide association studies (GWAS), genes discovered to date only account for a small proportion of overall genetic contributions to many complex traits. Association studies have difficulty in detecting the remaining true genetic variants that are either common variants with weak allelic effects, or rare variants that have strong allelic effects but are weakly associated at the population level. In this work we applied a goodness-of-fit test for detecting sets of common and rare variants associated with quantitative or binary traits by using whole genome sequencing (WGS) data. This test has been proved optimal for detecting weak and sparse signals in the literature, which fits the requirements for targeting the genetic components of missing heritability. Furthermore, this p-value-combining method allows one to incorporate different data and/or research results for meta-analysis. The method was used to simultaneously analyse the WGS and GWAS data of Genetic Analysis Workshop (GAW) 18 for detecting true genetic variants. The results show that goodness-of-fit test is comparable or better than the influential sequence kernel association test in many cases.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:wpi.edu/oai:digitalcommons.wpi.edu:etd-theses-1295 |
| Date | 25 April 2013 |
| Creators | Yang, Li |
| Contributors | Zheyang Wu, Advisor, , |
| Publisher | Digital WPI |
| Source Sets | Worcester Polytechnic Institute |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Masters Theses (All Theses, All Years) |
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