I am reading the thorough review by Wang, et al entitled "Analysing biological pathways in genome-wide association studies" and as this will become an important aspect of our research, I thought to solicit opinions and advice from BioStar members.
Which approach(es) do you take toward pathway or gene-set analysis of GWAS data? Do you prefer to work with a list of SNP p-values as input or raw SNP genotypes? Or something else? What are your primary sources of pathways and gene-sets? Which software tools do you prefer for the actual analysis?
Lastly, can you offer any advice regarding caveats or pitfalls to the analysis of GWAS data with pathways?
Thanks much - responses will certainly help in guiding our research in the near term.
1 answer
Hi Larry,
For this, I like to run my list of genes through my favorite Pubmed abstract searching tool: Chilibot. It practically writes paper discussions for you.
If using P-values, we also like to use GRAIL . Mary has a nice little tutorial on how it works over at OpenHelix.
GSA-SNP is very handy since it uses permutations.
Most recently our group has been using our own eQTL database compiled from a bunch of studies done by others, but we've also enjoyed using RegulomeDB and HaploReg. We've downloaded RegulomeDB since we use it quite frequently, but it only has a subset of the eQTL studies in the database I've built.
My colleague also has built a couple tools including GWAR which try to tap in to GWAS, ENCODE, eQTL, and other data types.
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