1
|
Schraiber JG, Edge MD, Pennell M. Unifying approaches from statistical genetics and phylogenetics for mapping phenotypes in structured populations. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2024:2024.02.10.579721. [PMID: 38496530 PMCID: PMC10942266 DOI: 10.1101/2024.02.10.579721] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 03/19/2024]
Abstract
In both statistical genetics and phylogenetics, a major goal is to identify correlations between genetic loci or other aspects of the phenotype or environment and a focal trait. In these two fields, there are sophisticated but disparate statistical traditions aimed at these tasks. The disconnect between their respective approaches is becoming untenable as questions in medicine, conservation biology, and evolutionary biology increasingly rely on integrating data from within and among species, and once-clear conceptual divisions are becoming increasingly blurred. To help bridge this divide, we derive a general model describing the covariance between the genetic contributions to the quantitative phenotypes of different individuals. Taking this approach shows that standard models in both statistical genetics (e.g., Genome-Wide Association Studies; GWAS) and phylogenetic comparative biology (e.g., phylogenetic regression) can be interpreted as special cases of this more general quantitative-genetic model. The fact that these models share the same core architecture means that we can build a unified understanding of the strengths and limitations of different methods for controlling for genetic structure when testing for associations. We develop intuition for why and when spurious correlations may occur using analytical theory and conduct population-genetic and phylogenetic simulations of quantitative traits. The structural similarity of problems in statistical genetics and phylogenetics enables us to take methodological advances from one field and apply them in the other. We demonstrate this by showing how a standard GWAS technique-including both the genetic relatedness matrix (GRM) as well as its leading eigenvectors, corresponding to the principal components of the genotype matrix, in a regression model-can mitigate spurious correlations in phylogenetic analyses. As a case study of this, we re-examine an analysis testing for co-evolution of expression levels between genes across a fungal phylogeny, and show that including covariance matrix eigenvectors as covariates decreases the false positive rate while simultaneously increasing the true positive rate. More generally, this work provides a foundation for more integrative approaches for understanding the genetic architecture of phenotypes and how evolutionary processes shape it.
Collapse
|
2
|
Link V, Schraiber JG, Fan C, Dinh B, Mancuso N, Chiang CWK, Edge MD. Tree-based QTL mapping with expected local genetic relatedness matrices. Am J Hum Genet 2023; 110:2077-2091. [PMID: 38065072 PMCID: PMC10716520 DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2023.10.017] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/08/2023] [Revised: 10/26/2023] [Accepted: 10/27/2023] [Indexed: 12/18/2023] Open
Abstract
Understanding the genetic basis of complex phenotypes is a central pursuit of genetics. Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) are a powerful way to find genetic loci associated with phenotypes. GWASs are widely and successfully used, but they face challenges related to the fact that variants are tested for association with a phenotype independently, whereas in reality variants at different sites are correlated because of their shared evolutionary history. One way to model this shared history is through the ancestral recombination graph (ARG), which encodes a series of local coalescent trees. Recent computational and methodological breakthroughs have made it feasible to estimate approximate ARGs from large-scale samples. Here, we explore the potential of an ARG-based approach to quantitative-trait locus (QTL) mapping, echoing existing variance-components approaches. We propose a framework that relies on the conditional expectation of a local genetic relatedness matrix (local eGRM) given the ARG. Simulations show that our method is especially beneficial for finding QTLs in the presence of allelic heterogeneity. By framing QTL mapping in terms of the estimated ARG, we can also facilitate the detection of QTLs in understudied populations. We use local eGRM to analyze two chromosomes containing known body size loci in a sample of Native Hawaiians. Our investigations can provide intuition about the benefits of using estimated ARGs in population- and statistical-genetic methods in general.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Vivian Link
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
| | - Joshua G Schraiber
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
| | - Caoqi Fan
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Center for Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
| | - Bryan Dinh
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Center for Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
| | - Nicholas Mancuso
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Center for Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
| | - Charleston W K Chiang
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Center for Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
| | - Michael D Edge
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
| |
Collapse
|
3
|
Link V, Schraiber JG, Fan C, Dinh B, Mancuso N, Chiang CW, Edge MD. Tree-based QTL mapping with expected local genetic relatedness matrices. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2023:2023.04.07.536093. [PMID: 37066144 PMCID: PMC10104234 DOI: 10.1101/2023.04.07.536093] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 04/18/2023]
Abstract
Understanding the genetic basis of complex phenotypes is a central pursuit of genetics. Genome-wide Association Studies (GWAS) are a powerful way to find genetic loci associated with phenotypes. GWAS are widely and successfully used, but they face challenges related to the fact that variants are tested for association with a phenotype independently, whereas in reality variants at different sites are correlated because of their shared evolutionary history. One way to model this shared history is through the ancestral recombination graph (ARG), which encodes a series of local coalescent trees. Recent computational and methodological breakthroughs have made it feasible to estimate approximate ARGs from large-scale samples. Here, we explore the potential of an ARG-based approach to quantitative-trait locus (QTL) mapping, echoing existing variance-components approaches. We propose a framework that relies on the conditional expectation of a local genetic relatedness matrix given the ARG (local eGRM). Simulations show that our method is especially beneficial for finding QTLs in the presence of allelic heterogeneity. By framing QTL mapping in terms of the estimated ARG, we can also facilitate the detection of QTLs in understudied populations. We use local eGRM to identify a large-effect BMI locus, the CREBRF gene, in a sample of Native Hawaiians in which it was not previously detectable by GWAS because of a lack of population-specific imputation resources. Our investigations can provide intuition about the benefits of using estimated ARGs in population- and statistical-genetic methods in general.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Vivian Link
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California
| | - Joshua G. Schraiber
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California
| | - Caoqi Fan
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California
- Center for Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California
| | - Bryan Dinh
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California
- Center for Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California
| | - Nicholas Mancuso
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California
- Center for Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California
| | - Charleston W.K. Chiang
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California
- Center for Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California
| | - Michael D. Edge
- Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California
| |
Collapse
|
4
|
Wang S, Ge S, Sobkowiak B, Wang L, Grandjean L, Colijn C, Elliott LT. Genome-Wide Association with Uncertainty in the Genetic Similarity Matrix. J Comput Biol 2023; 30:189-203. [PMID: 36374242 DOI: 10.1089/cmb.2022.0067] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/16/2022] Open
Abstract
Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) are often confounded by population stratification and structure. Linear mixed models (LMMs) are a powerful class of methods for uncovering genetic effects, while controlling for such confounding. LMMs include random effects for a genetic similarity matrix, and they assume that a true genetic similarity matrix is known. However, uncertainty about the phylogenetic structure of a study population may degrade the quality of LMM results. This may happen in bacterial studies in which the number of samples or loci is small, or in studies with low-quality genotyping. In this study, we develop methods for linear mixed models in which the genetic similarity matrix is unknown and is derived from Markov chain Monte Carlo estimates of the phylogeny. We apply our model to a GWAS of multidrug resistance in tuberculosis, and illustrate our methods on simulated data.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Shijia Wang
- School of Statistics and Data Science, LPMC and KLMDASR, Nankai University, Tianjin, China
| | - Shufei Ge
- Institute of Mathematical Sciences, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China
| | | | - Liangliang Wang
- Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
| | - Louis Grandjean
- Department of Infectious Diseases, University College London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Caroline Colijn
- Department of Mathematics and Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
| | - Lloyd T Elliott
- Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
| |
Collapse
|