Biology subjects

Hua Tang

Publications and source records attributed to Hua Tang.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2016

Joint Genotype- and Ancestry-based Genome-wide Association Studies in Admixed Populations

In Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) genetic loci that influence complex traits are localized by inspecting associations between genotypes of genetic markers and the values of the trait of interest. On the other hand Admixture Mapping, which is performed in case of populations consisting of a recent mix of two ancestral groups, relies on the ancestry information at each locus (locus-specific ancestry).Recently it has been proposed to jointly model genotype and locus-specific ancestry within the framework of single marker tests. Here we extend this approach for population-based GWAS in the direction of multi marker models. A modified version of the Bayesian Information Criterion is developed for building a multi-locus model, which accounts for the differential correlation structure due to linkage disequilibrium and admixture linkage disequilibrium. Simulation studies and a real data example illustrate the advantages of this new approach compared to single-marker analysis and modern model selection strategies based on separately analyzing genotype and ancestry data, as well as to single-marker analysis combining genotypic and ancestry information. Depending on the signal strength our procedure automatically chooses whether genotypic or locus-specific ancestry markers are added to the model. This results in a good compromise between the power to detect causal mutations and the precision of their localization. The proposed method has been implemented in R and is available at http://www.math.uni.wroc.pl/~mbogdan/admixtures/.

Genomics↗

bioRxiv2016

Increasing the Efficiency of Genome-wide Association Mapping via Hidden Markov Models

With the rapid production of high dimensional genetic data, one major challenge in genome-wide association studies is to develop effective and efficient statistical tools to resolve the low power problem of detecting causal SNPs with low to moderate susceptibility, whose effects are often obscured by substantial background noises. Here we present a novel method that serves as an optimal technique for reducing background noises and improving detection power in genome-wide association studies. The approach uses hidden Markov model and its derivate Markov hidden Markov model to estimate the posterior probabilities of a markers being in an associated state. We conducted extensive simulations based on the human whole genome genotype data from the GlaxoSmithKline-POPRES project to calibrate the sensitivity and specificity of our method and compared with many popular approaches for detecting positive signals including the{chi} 2 test for association and the Cochran-Armitage trend test. Our simulation results suggested that at very low false positive rates (< 10-6), our method reaches the power of 0.9, and is more powerful than any other approaches, when the allelic effect of the causal variant is non-additive or unknown. Application of our method to the data set generated by Welcome Trust Case Control Consortium using 14,000 cases and 3,000 controls confirmed its powerfulness and efficiency under the context of the large-scale genome-wide association studies.

Genetics↗

bioRxiv2015

Integrative analysis of RNA, translation and protein levels reveals distinct regulatory variation across humans

Elucidating the consequences of genetic differences between humans is essential for understanding phenotypic diversity and personalized medicine. Although variation in RNA levels, transcription factor binding and chromatin have been explored, little is known about global variation in translation and its genetic determinants. We used ribosome profiling, RNA sequencing, and mass spectrometry to perform an integrated analysis in lymphoblastoid cell lines from a diverse group of individuals. We find significant differences in RNA, translation, and protein levels suggesting diverse mechanisms of personalized gene expression control. Combined analysis of RNA expression and ribosome occupancy improves the identification of individual protein level differences. Finally, we identify genetic differences that specifically modulate ribosome occupancy - many of these differences lie close to start codons and upstream ORFs. Our results reveal a new level of gene expression variation among humans and indicate that genetic variants can cause changes in protein levels through effects on translation.

Genomics↗