Epistasis Blog

From the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Lab at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (www.epistasis.org)

Friday, February 18, 2011

A genome-wide screen of gene-gene interactions for rheumatoid arthritis susceptibility

This is a nice example of a genome-wide epistasis analysis. Nice that their interactions replicate. It would interesting to know how many of their interactions that didn't replicate are real. There are many very good resons for why an nteraction effect would not replicate in an indendent sample, especially if it is from a different study or population.

Liu C, Ackerman HH, Carulli JP. A genome-wide screen of gene-gene interactions for rheumatoid arthritis susceptibility. Hum Genet. 2011 Jan 6. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 21210282. [PubMed]

Abstract

The objective of the study was to identify interacting genes contributing to rheumatoid arthritis (RA) susceptibility and identify SNPs that discriminate between RA patients who were anti-cyclic citrullinated protein positive and healthy controls. We analyzed two independent cohorts from the North American Rheumatoid Arthritis Consortium. A cohort of 908 RA cases and 1,260 controls was used to discover pairwise interactions among SNPs and to identify a set of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that predict RA status, and a second cohort of 952 cases and 1,760 controls was used to validate the findings. After adjusting for HLA-shared epitope alleles, we identified and replicated seven SNP pairs within the HLA class II locus with significant interaction effects. We failed to replicate significant pairwise interactions among non-HLA SNPs. The machine learning approach "random forest" applied to a set of SNPs selected from single-SNP and pairwise interaction tests identified 93 SNPs that distinguish RA cases from controls with 70% accuracy. HLA SNPs provide the most classification information, and inclusion of non-HLA SNPs improved classification. While specific gene-gene interactions are difficult to validate using genome-wide SNP data, a stepwise approach combining association and classification methods identifies candidate interacting SNPs that distinguish RA cases from healthy controls.

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