GUESS-ing Polygenic Associations with Multiple Phenotypes Using a GPU-Based Evolutionary Stochastic Search Algorithm

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) yielded significant advances in defining the genetic architecture of complex traits and disease. Still, a major hurdle of GWAS is narrowing down multiple genetic associations to a few causal variants for functional studies. This becomes critical in multi-phenotype GWAS where detection and interpretability of complex SNP(s)-trait(s) associations are complicated by complex Linkage Disequilibrium patterns between SNPs and correlation between traits. Here we propose a computationally efficient algorithm (GUESS) to explore complex genetic-association models and maximize genetic variant detection. We integrated our algorithm with a new Bayesian strategy for multi-phenotype analysis to identify the specific contribution of each SNP to different trait combinations and study genetic regulation of lipid metabolism in the Gutenberg Health Study (GHS). Despite the relatively small size of GHS (n = 3,175), when compared with the largest published meta-GWAS (n>100,000), GUESS recovered most of the major associations and was better at refining multi-trait associations than alternative methods. Amongst the new findings provided by GUESS, we revealed a strong association of SORT1 with TG-APOB and LIPC with TG-HDL phenotypic groups, which were overlooked in the larger meta-GWAS and not revealed by competing approaches, associations that we replicated in two independent cohorts. Moreover, we demonstrated the increased power of GUESS over alternative multi-phenotype approaches, both Bayesian and non-Bayesian, in a simulation study that mimics real-case scenarios. We showed that our parallel implementation based on Graphics Processing Units outperforms alternative multi-phenotype methods. Beyond multivariate modelling of multi-phenotypes, our Bayesian model employs a flexible hierarchical prior structure for genetic effects that adapts to any correlation structure of the predictors and increases the power to identify associated variants. This provides a powerful tool for the analysis of diverse genomic features, for instance including gene expression and exome sequencing data, where complex dependencies are present in the predictor space.Author Summary: Nowadays, the availability of cheaper and accurate assays to quantify multiple (endo)phenotypes in large population cohorts allows multi-trait studies. However, these studies are limited by the lack of flexible models integrated with efficient computational tools for genome-wide multi SNPs-traits analyses. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel Bayesian analysis strategy and a new algorithmic implementation which exploits parallel processing architecture for fully multivariate modeling of groups of correlated phenotypes at the genome-wide scale. In addition to increased power of our algorithm over alternative Bayesian and well-established non-Bayesian multi-phenotype methods, we provide an application to a real case study of several blood lipid traits, and show how our method recovered most of the major associations and is better at refining multi-trait polygenic associations than alternative methods. We reveal and replicate in independent cohorts new associations with two phenotypic groups that were not detected by competing multivariate approaches and not noticed by a large meta-GWAS. We also discuss the applicability of the proposed method to large meta-analyses involving hundreds of thousands of individuals and to diverse genomic datasets where complex dependencies in the predictor space are present.