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Batista S, Madar VS, Freda PJ, Bhandary P, Ghosh A, Matsumoto N, Chitre AS, Palmer AA, Moore JH. Interaction models matter: an efficient, flexible computational framework for model-specific investigation of epistasis. BioData Min 2024; 17:7. [PMID: 38419006 PMCID: PMC10900690 DOI: 10.1186/s13040-024-00358-0] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/06/2023] [Accepted: 02/20/2024] [Indexed: 03/02/2024] Open
Abstract
PURPOSE Epistasis, the interaction between two or more genes, is integral to the study of genetics and is present throughout nature. Yet, it is seldom fully explored as most approaches primarily focus on single-locus effects, partly because analyzing all pairwise and higher-order interactions requires significant computational resources. Furthermore, existing methods for epistasis detection only consider a Cartesian (multiplicative) model for interaction terms. This is likely limiting as epistatic interactions can evolve to produce varied relationships between genetic loci, some complex and not linearly separable. METHODS We present new algorithms for the interaction coefficients for standard regression models for epistasis that permit many varied models for the interaction terms for loci and efficient memory usage. The algorithms are given for two-way and three-way epistasis and may be generalized to higher order epistasis. Statistical tests for the interaction coefficients are also provided. We also present an efficient matrix based algorithm for permutation testing for two-way epistasis. We offer a proof and experimental evidence that methods that look for epistasis only at loci that have main effects may not be justified. Given the computational efficiency of the algorithm, we applied the method to a rat data set and mouse data set, with at least 10,000 loci and 1,000 samples each, using the standard Cartesian model and the XOR model to explore body mass index. RESULTS This study reveals that although many of the loci found to exhibit significant statistical epistasis overlap between models in rats, the pairs are mostly distinct. Further, the XOR model found greater evidence for statistical epistasis in many more pairs of loci in both data sets with almost all significant epistasis in mice identified using XOR. In the rat data set, loci involved in epistasis under the XOR model are enriched for biologically relevant pathways. CONCLUSION Our results in both species show that many biologically relevant epistatic relationships would have been undetected if only one interaction model was applied, providing evidence that varied interaction models should be implemented to explore epistatic interactions that occur in living systems.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sandra Batista
- Department of Computational Biomedicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, 700 N San Vicente Blvd., Pacific Design Center, Guite G540, West Hollywood, CA, 90069, USA.
| | | | - Philip J Freda
- Department of Computational Biomedicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, 700 N San Vicente Blvd., Pacific Design Center, Guite G540, West Hollywood, CA, 90069, USA
| | - Priyanka Bhandary
- Department of Computational Biomedicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, 700 N San Vicente Blvd., Pacific Design Center, Guite G540, West Hollywood, CA, 90069, USA
| | - Attri Ghosh
- Department of Computational Biomedicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, 700 N San Vicente Blvd., Pacific Design Center, Guite G540, West Hollywood, CA, 90069, USA
| | - Nicholas Matsumoto
- Department of Computational Biomedicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, 700 N San Vicente Blvd., Pacific Design Center, Guite G540, West Hollywood, CA, 90069, USA
| | - Apurva S Chitre
- Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., Mailcode: 0667, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0667, USA
| | - Abraham A Palmer
- Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., Mailcode: 0667, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0667, USA
- Institute for Genomic Medicine, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., Mailcode: 0667, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0667, USA
| | - Jason H Moore
- Department of Computational Biomedicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, 700 N San Vicente Blvd., Pacific Design Center, Guite G540, West Hollywood, CA, 90069, USA.
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Lundberg M, Sng LMF, Szul P, Dunne R, Bayat A, Burnham SC, Bauer DC, Twine NA. Novel Alzheimer's disease genes and epistasis identified using machine learning GWAS platform. Sci Rep 2023; 13:17662. [PMID: 37848535 PMCID: PMC10582044 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-44378-y] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/04/2023] [Accepted: 10/07/2023] [Indexed: 10/19/2023] Open
Abstract
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a complex genetic disease, and variants identified through genome-wide association studies (GWAS) explain only part of its heritability. Epistasis has been proposed as a major contributor to this 'missing heritability', however, many current methods are limited to only modelling additive effects. We use VariantSpark, a machine learning approach to GWAS, and BitEpi, a tool for epistasis detection, to identify AD associated variants and interactions across two independent cohorts, ADNI and UK Biobank. By incorporating significant epistatic interactions, we captured 10.41% more phenotypic variance than logistic regression (LR). We validate the well-established AD loci, APOE, and identify two novel genome-wide significant AD associated loci in both cohorts, SH3BP4 and SASH1, which are also in significant epistatic interactions with APOE. We show that the SH3BP4 SNP has a modulating effect on the known pathogenic APOE SNP, demonstrating a possible protective mechanism against AD. SASH1 is involved in a triplet interaction with pathogenic APOE SNP and ACOT11, where the SASH1 SNP lowered the pathogenic interaction effect between ACOT11 and APOE. Finally, we demonstrate that VariantSpark detects disease associations with 80% fewer controls than LR, unlocking discoveries in well annotated but smaller cohorts.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mischa Lundberg
- Transformational Bioinformatics, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
- UQ Frazer Institute, The University of Queensland, Woolloongabba, QLD, Australia.
- Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia.
| | - Letitia M F Sng
- Transformational Bioinformatics, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | - Piotr Szul
- Health Data Semantics and Interoperability, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation AU, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
| | - Rob Dunne
- Data61, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
| | - Arash Bayat
- The Kinghorn Cancer Center (KCCG), Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | | | - Denis C Bauer
- Transformational Bioinformatics, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Department of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health Science, Macquarie University, Macquarie Park, NSW, Australia
- Applied BioSciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Macquarie University, Macquarie Park, NSW, Australia
| | - Natalie A Twine
- Transformational Bioinformatics, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
- Applied BioSciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Macquarie University, Macquarie Park, NSW, Australia.
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Stamp J, DenAdel A, Weinreich D, Crawford L. Leveraging the genetic correlation between traits improves the detection of epistasis in genome-wide association studies. G3 (BETHESDA, MD.) 2023; 13:jkad118. [PMID: 37243672 PMCID: PMC10484060 DOI: 10.1093/g3journal/jkad118] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/11/2023] [Revised: 01/11/2023] [Accepted: 05/23/2023] [Indexed: 05/29/2023]
Abstract
Epistasis, commonly defined as the interaction between genetic loci, is known to play an important role in the phenotypic variation of complex traits. As a result, many statistical methods have been developed to identify genetic variants that are involved in epistasis, and nearly all of these approaches carry out this task by focusing on analyzing one trait at a time. Previous studies have shown that jointly modeling multiple phenotypes can often dramatically increase statistical power for association mapping. In this study, we present the "multivariate MArginal ePIstasis Test" (mvMAPIT)-a multioutcome generalization of a recently proposed epistatic detection method which seeks to detect marginal epistasis or the combined pairwise interaction effects between a given variant and all other variants. By searching for marginal epistatic effects, one can identify genetic variants that are involved in epistasis without the need to identify the exact partners with which the variants interact-thus, potentially alleviating much of the statistical and computational burden associated with conventional explicit search-based methods. Our proposed mvMAPIT builds upon this strategy by taking advantage of correlation structure between traits to improve the identification of variants involved in epistasis. We formulate mvMAPIT as a multivariate linear mixed model and develop a multitrait variance component estimation algorithm for efficient parameter inference and P-value computation. Together with reasonable model approximations, our proposed approach is scalable to moderately sized genome-wide association studies. With simulations, we illustrate the benefits of mvMAPIT over univariate (or single-trait) epistatic mapping strategies. We also apply mvMAPIT framework to protein sequence data from two broadly neutralizing anti-influenza antibodies and approximately 2,000 heterogeneous stock of mice from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics. The mvMAPIT R package can be downloaded at https://github.com/lcrawlab/mvMAPIT.
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Affiliation(s)
- Julian Stamp
- Center for Computational Molecular Biology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02906, USA
| | - Alan DenAdel
- Center for Computational Molecular Biology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02906, USA
| | - Daniel Weinreich
- Center for Computational Molecular Biology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02906, USA
- Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02906, USA
| | - Lorin Crawford
- Center for Computational Molecular Biology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02906, USA
- Department of Biostatistics, Brown University, Providence, RI 02903, USA
- Microsoft Research New England, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA
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Saha S, Perrin L, Röder L, Brun C, Spinelli L. Epi-MEIF: detecting higher order epistatic interactions for complex traits using mixed effect conditional inference forests. Nucleic Acids Res 2022; 50:e114. [PMID: 36107776 PMCID: PMC9639209 DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkac715] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/06/2022] [Revised: 07/29/2022] [Accepted: 09/12/2022] [Indexed: 12/04/2022] Open
Abstract
Understanding the relationship between genetic variations and variations in complex and quantitative phenotypes remains an ongoing challenge. While Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have become a vital tool for identifying single-locus associations, we lack methods for identifying epistatic interactions. In this article, we propose a novel method for higher-order epistasis detection using mixed effect conditional inference forest (epiMEIF). The proposed method is fitted on a group of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) potentially associated with the phenotype and the tree structure in the forest facilitates the identification of n-way interactions between the SNPs. Additional testing strategies further improve the robustness of the method. We demonstrate its ability to detect true n-way interactions via extensive simulations in both cross-sectional and longitudinal synthetic datasets. This is further illustrated in an application to reveal epistatic interactions from natural variations of cardiac traits in flies (Drosophila). Overall, the method provides a generalized way to identify higher-order interactions from any GWAS data, thereby greatly improving the detection of the genetic architecture underlying complex phenotypes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Saswati Saha
- Aix Marseille Univ, INSERM, TAGC (UMR1090), Turing Centre for Living systems , Marseille , France
| | - Laurent Perrin
- Aix Marseille Univ, INSERM, TAGC (UMR1090), Turing Centre for Living systems , Marseille , France
- CNRS , Marseille , France
| | - Laurence Röder
- Aix Marseille Univ, INSERM, TAGC (UMR1090), Turing Centre for Living systems , Marseille , France
| | - Christine Brun
- Aix Marseille Univ, INSERM, TAGC (UMR1090), Turing Centre for Living systems , Marseille , France
- CNRS , Marseille , France
| | - Lionel Spinelli
- Aix Marseille Univ, INSERM, TAGC (UMR1090), Turing Centre for Living systems , Marseille , France
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Ramarao-Milne P, Jain Y, Sng LM, Hosking B, Lee C, Bayat A, Kuiper M, Wilson LO, Twine NA, Bauer DC. Data-driven platform for identifying variants of interest in COVID-19 virus. Comput Struct Biotechnol J 2022; 20:2942-2950. [PMID: 35677774 PMCID: PMC9162986 DOI: 10.1016/j.csbj.2022.06.005] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/08/2022] [Revised: 05/31/2022] [Accepted: 06/01/2022] [Indexed: 12/03/2022] Open
Abstract
We provide an automated way to identify emerging variants of concern using viral genome and patient-outcome data. We assembled 10,000 sample-strong case-control dataset and identified 117 single nucleotide variants (SNV) associated with adverse patient outcomes. We observe co-evolution of protective and pathogenic interactions between the spike, nsp14, and N region with either orf3a or nsp3. Structural modelling reveals mutation clusters in the Zn binding domain of nsp14 suggesting ongoing adaptation to the human host. Our approach identified Variants Being Monitored (VBM) a week before they were flagged by Health Organizations and offers a clade-independent function-orientated grouping.
New SARS-CoV-2 variants emerge as part of the virus’ adaptation to the human host. The Health Organizations are monitoring newly emerging variants with suspected impact on disease or vaccination efficacy as Variants Being Monitored (VBM), like Delta and Omicron. Genetic changes (SNVs) compared to the Wuhan variant characterize VBMs with current emphasis on the spike protein and lineage markers. However, monitoring VBMs in such a way might miss SNVs with functional effect on disease. Here we introduce a lineage-agnostic genome-wide approach to identify SNVs associated with disease. We curated a case-control dataset of 10,520 samples and identified 117 SNVs significantly associated with adverse patient outcome. While 40% (47) SNV are already monitored and 36% (43) are in the spike protein, we also identified 70 new SNVs that are associated with disease outcome. 31 of these are disease-worsening and predominantly located in the 3′-5′ exonuclease (NSP14) with structural modelling revealing a concise cluster in the Zn binding domain that has known host-immune modulating function. Furthermore, we generate clade-independent VBM groupings by identifying interacting SNVs (epistasis). We find 37 sets of higher-order epistatic interactions joining 5 genomic regions (nsp3, nsp14, Spike S1, ORF3a, N). Structural modelling of these regions provides insights into potential mechanistic pathways of increased virulence as well as orthogonal methods of validation. Clade-independent monitoring of functionally interacting (epistasis, co-evolution) SNVs detected emerging VBM a week before they were flagged by Health Organizations and in conjunction with structural modelling provides faster, mechanistic insight into emerging strains to guide public health interventions.
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