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SNP and CNV combine effect in GWAS

Hi, I'm studying about the SNP and CNV combine effect in GWAS. Normally, the SNP and CNV are analyzed separately, however, what if there's a SNP on a CNV(Let's call it CNV-SNP)? And what if one chromosome has CNV-SNP, and the other one does not? In the end, we need to encode genetic variants into number so that model can be built, and the CNV-SNP will interfere with that process.

I read some researches about CNV and quantitative trait association, but my question is still left unanswered. One research mention this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6200315/, but does not point out the way to accommodate the effect of CNV-SNP.

If anyone has dealt with this problem before, please help me with this.

Thank you very much.

snp cnv gwas

Usually when we have a SNP we assume an underlying diploidy and code 0 (no variant), 1 - heterozygous, 2 - homozygous. You may to code your "duplicated SNPs" as 3 and in theory regression models used in GWAS should tolerate that, however it is not clear if duplicated copy is functional.

Another thing - you need to work with quite frequent CNVs (at least several times per cohort) to include them in GWAS. Otherwise I don't see any problem in including them into GWAS - you separate deletions from duplications and code them as 0/1/2 for deletions, 0/1/2 for duplications (everything higher than 4 copies can become 2) and simply put into your linear models.

Arrays simply don't allow allele-specificity (unless it is cancer and CNVs are very long, and it is also quite limited), so I'd not worry about allele-specific effects. Maybe inferred using linkage disequilibrium, but meh, complex thing =)

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