Supplementary text for the methods.
<div><p>Transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) have emerged as a powerful tool for identifying gene-trait associations by integrating gene expression mapping studies with genome-wide association studies (GWAS). While most existing TWAS approaches focus on marginal analyses through examining one gene at a time, recent developments in TWAS fine-mapping methods enable the joint modeling of multiple genes to refine the identification of potentially causal ones. However, these fine-mapping methods have primarily focused on modeling quantitative traits and examining local genomic regions, leading to potentially suboptimal performance. Here, we present FABIO, a TWAS fine-mapping method specifically designed for binary traits that is capable of modeling all genes jointly on an entire chromosome. FABIO employs a probit model to directly link the genetically regulated expression (GReX) of genes to binary outcomes while taking into account the GReX correlation among all genes residing on a chromosome. As a result, FABIO effectively controls false discoveries while offering substantial power gains over existing TWAS fine-mapping approaches. We performed extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of FABIO and applied it for in-depth analyses of six binary disease traits in the UK Biobank. In the real datasets, FABIO significantly reduced the size of the causal gene sets by 27.9%-36.9% over existing approaches across traits. Leveraging its improved power, FABIO successfully prioritized multiple potentially causal genes associated with the diseases, including <i>GATA3</i> for asthma, <i>ABCG2</i> for gout, and <i>SH2B3</i> for hypertension. Overall, FABIO represents an effective tool for TWAS fine-mapping of disease traits.</p></div>
Publication Details
- Journal
- Figshare
- Published
- 2024-12-02
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1011503.s017
- Primary Topic
- Mycorrhizal Fungi and Plant Interactions
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00