title: Genotype Correlation Analysis Reveals Pathway-Based Functional Disequilibrium and Potential Epistasis in the Human Interactome.
abstract: Epistasis is thought to be a pervasive part of complex phenotypes due to the dynamics and complexity of biological systems, and a further understanding of epistasis in the context of biological pathways may provide insight into the etiology of complex disease. In this study, we use genotype data from the International HapMap Project to characterize the functional dependencies between alleles in the human interactome as defined by KEGG pathways. We performed chi-square tests to identify non-independence between functionally-related SNP pairs within parental Caucasian and Yoruba samples. We further refine this list by testing for skewed transmission of pseudo-haplotypes to offspring using a haplotype-based TDT test. From these analyses, we identify pathways enriched for functional disequilibrium, and a set of 863 SNP pairs (representing 453 gene pairs) showing consistent non-independence and transmission distortion. These results represent gene pairs with strong evidence of epistasis within the context of a biological function.
authors.affiliation: Center for Human Genetics Research, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA.
authors.forename: William S
authors.initials: WS
authors.lastname: Bush
authors.affiliation: Institute for Computational Biology, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA.
authors.forename: Jonathan L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Haines