Locate Complex Disease Loci by Investigating Gene and Environment Interaction for Genome-Wide Association Studies

• Activity Number: 515
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 4, 2010 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Biopharmaceutical Section
• Author(s): Jin Zheng*+
• Companies: Eli Lilly and Company
• Keywords: statistical genetics ; gene-environment interaction ; GWAS

Abstract

Susceptibility to most of complex diseases is influenced by a combination of genetic factors, environmental factors, and interactions between them. However, it still remains uncertain how to trace the disease susceptibility loci by considering the role of environment and its potential to interact with genes, especially in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). In this paper, I proposed a new likelihood-based method to identify genes involved in a gene-environment interaction. I compared its performance with the traditional logistic regression model, case-only method, 2-step method and the empirical Bayes-type method, through various criteria and under a range of settings of parameters. The new approach shows merit in various settings, especially when the disease is not very rare, and the empirical power of the new method was still great when the violation of the assumption was modest.