Behavior of QQ-plots and genomic control in studies of gene-environment interaction.

Behavior of QQ-plots and genomic control in studies of gene-environment interaction.

Blog Article

ivoryjinelle.com Genome-wide association studies of gene-environment interaction (GxE GWAS) are becoming popular.As with main effects GWAS, quantile-quantile plots (QQ-plots) and Genomic Control are being used to assess and correct for population substructure.However, in G x E work these approaches can be seriously misleading, as we illustrate; QQ-plots may give strong indications of substructure when absolutely none is present.

Using simulation and theory, we show how and why spurious QQ-plot inflation occurs read more in G x E GWAS, and how this differs from main-effects analyses.We also explain how simple adjustments to standard regression-based methods used in G x E GWAS can alleviate this problem.