Causal Networks in Genome-Wide Asssociation StudiesWhen: Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Where: DA 5th fl
Speaker: Murat Tasan, PhD
Organization: Research Fellow, Roth Lab, Donnelly Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto
Sponsor: CCNR and Barabási Lab Seminar
The past decade has seen over 1500 genome-wide association (GWA) studies published on hundreds of human traits. Despite this rapid collection of genetic data, the number of disease-driving genes/mutations found has remained low, as the GWA studies typically only identify broad loci, each of which may contain a large number of genes. Here we augment traditional GWA studies by combining diverse gene-gene relationship evidence to create functional association networks, which are mined to prioritize disease-related genes. We use a set of known cancer-related genes as a positive control to assess our ability to rank etiologically-relevant genes highly.