A SUPER powerful method for genome wide association study

PLoS One. 2014 Sep 23;9(9):e107684. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0107684. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Genome-Wide Association Studies shed light on the identification of genes underlying human diseases and agriculturally important traits. This potential has been shadowed by false positive findings. The Mixed Linear Model (MLM) method is flexible enough to simultaneously incorporate population structure and cryptic relationships to reduce false positives. However, its intensive computational burden is prohibitive in practice, especially for large samples. The newly developed algorithm, FaST-LMM, solved the computational problem, but requires that the number of SNPs be less than the number of individuals to derive a rank-reduced relationship. This restriction potentially leads to less statistical power when compared to using all SNPs. We developed a method to extract a small subset of SNPs and use them in FaST-LMM. This method not only retains the computational advantage of FaST-LMM, but also remarkably increases statistical power even when compared to using the entire set of SNPs. We named the method SUPER (Settlement of MLM Under Progressively Exclusive Relationship) and made it available within an implementation of the GAPIT software package.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Animals
  • Genetic Markers*
  • Genome
  • Genome-Wide Association Study / methods*
  • Humans
  • Linear Models
  • Magnoliopsida / genetics
  • Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
  • Software

Substances

  • Genetic Markers

Grants and funding

This study was supported by NSF-Plant Genome Program (DBI- 0820619), National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no 31370043, 31272414), National 948 Project of China (2011-G2A,2012-Z26), National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (2012AA101104 and 2012AA10A307), and the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.