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. 2021 Nov 3:4:719737.
doi: 10.3389/fdata.2021.719737. eCollection 2021.

Systematic Exploration in Tissue-Pathway Associations of Complex Traits Using Comprehensive eQTLs Catalog

Boqi Wang  1 , James Yang  2 , Steven Qiu  3 , Yongsheng Bai  4 , Zhaohui S Qin  5
Affiliations

Systematic Exploration in Tissue-Pathway Associations of Complex Traits Using Comprehensive eQTLs Catalog

Boqi Wang et al. Front Big Data. .

Abstract

The collection of expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) is an important resource to study complex traits through understanding where and how transcriptional regulations are controlled by genetic variations in the non-coding regions of the genome. Previous studies have focused on associating eQTLs with traits to identify the roles of trait-related eQTLs and their corresponding target genes involved in trait determination. Since most genes function as a part of pathways in a systematic manner, it is crucial to explore the pathways' involvements in complex traits to test potentially novel hypotheses and to reveal underlying mechanisms of disease pathogenesis. In this study, we expanded and applied loci2path software to perform large-scale eQTLs enrichment [i.e., eQTLs' target genes (eGenes) enrichment] analysis at pathway level to identify the tissue-specific enriched pathways within trait-related genomic intervals. By utilizing 13,791,909 eQTLs cataloged in the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) V8 data for 49 tissue types, 2,893 pathway sets reported from MSigDB, and query regions derived from the Phenotype-Genotype Integrator (PheGenI) catalog, we identified intriguing biological pathways that are likely to be involved in ten traits [Alzheimer's disease (AD), body mass index, Parkinson's disease (PD), schizophrenia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), stroke, blood pressure, autism spectrum disorder, and myocardial infarction]. Furthermore, we extracted the most significant pathways for AD, such as BioCarta D4-GDI pathway and WikiPathways sulfation biotransformation reaction and viral acute myocarditis pathways, to study specific genes within pathways. Our data presented new hypotheses in AD pathogenesis supported by previous studies, like the increased level of caspase-3 in the amygdala that cleaves GDP dissociation inhibitor and binds to beta-amyloid, leading to increased apoptosis and neuronal loss. Our findings also revealed potential pathogenesis mechanisms for PD, schizophrenia, NSCLC, blood pressure, autism spectrum disorder, and myocardial infarction, which were consistent with past studies. Our results indicated that loci2path's eQTLs enrichment test was valuable in unveiling novel biological mechanisms of complex traits. The discovered mechanisms of disease pathogenesis and traits require further in-depth analysis and experimental validation.

Keywords: complex traits; eQTLs; gene pathway sets; gene set enrichment analyses; tissue-pathway association.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
A diagram depicting our study’s analysis pipeline, including input data, internal processes, and output results.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Heatmap of Alzheimer’s disease’s eQTLs enrichment results in (A) BioCarta and (B) WikiPathways pathway sets, respectively.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Heatmap of schizophrenia’s eQTLs enrichment results in (A) KEGG and (B) PID pathway sets.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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