Joint study of genetic regulators for expression traits related to breast cancer.
BACKGROUND
The mRNA expression levels of genes have been shown to have discriminating power for the classification of breast cancer. Studying the heritability of gene expression levels on breast cancer related transcripts can lead to the identification of shared common regulators and inter-regulation patterns, which would be important for dissecting the etiology of breast cancer.


RESULTS
We applied multilocus association genome-wide scans to 18 breast cancer related transcripts and combined the results with traditional linkage scans. Regulatory hotspots for these transcripts were identified and some inter-regulation patterns were observed. We also derived evidence on interacting genetic regulatory loci shared by a number of these transcripts.


CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, by restricting to a set of related genes, we were able to employ a more detailed multilocus approach that evaluates both marginal and interaction association signals at each single-nucleotide polymorphism. Interesting inter-regulation patterns and significant overlaps of genetic regulators between transcripts were observed. Interaction association results returned more expression quantitative trait locus hotspots that are significant.
Zheng
Tian
T
Department of Statistics, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA. tzheng@stat.columbia.edu
Wang
Shuang
S
Cong
Lei
L
Ding
Yuejing
Y
Ionita-Laza
Iuliana
I
Lo
Shaw-Hwa
SH