GWAS significance thresholds for deep phenotyping studies can depend upon minor allele frequencies and sample size

Huma Asif, Ney Alliey-Rodriguez, Sarah Keedy, Carol A. Tamminga, John A. Sweeney, Godfrey Pearlson, Brett A. Clementz, Matcheri S. Keshavan, Peter Buckley, Chunyu Liu, Benjamin Neale, Elliot S. Gershon

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

An important issue affecting genome-wide association studies with deep phenotyping (multiple correlated phenotypes) is determining the suitable family-wise significance threshold. Straightforward family-wise correction (Bonferroni) of p < 0.05 for 4.3 million genotypes and 335 phenotypes would give a threshold of p < 3.46E−11. This would be too conservative because it assumes all tests are independent. The effective number of tests, both phenotypic and genotypic, must be adjusted for the correlations between them. Spectral decomposition of the phenotype matrix and LD-based correction of the number of tested SNPs are currently used to determine an effective number of tests. In this paper, we compare these calculated estimates with permutation-determined family-wise significance thresholds. Permutations are performed by shuffling individual IDs of the genotype vector for this dataset, to preserve correlation of phenotypes. Our results demonstrate that the permutation threshold is influenced by minor allele frequency (MAF) of the SNPs, and by the number of individuals tested. For the more common SNPs (MAF > 0.1), the permutation family-wise threshold was in close agreement with spectral decomposition methods. However, for less common SNPs (0.05 < MAF ≤ 0.1), the permutation threshold calculated over all SNPs was off by orders of magnitude. This applies to the number of individuals studied (here 777) but not to very much larger numbers. Based on these findings, we propose that the threshold to find a particular level of family-wise significance may need to be established using separate permutations of the actual data for several MAF bins.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)2048-2055
Number of pages8
JournalMolecular psychiatry
Volume26
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2021

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Molecular Biology
  • Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
  • Psychiatry and Mental health

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'GWAS significance thresholds for deep phenotyping studies can depend upon minor allele frequencies and sample size'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this