Genetic Analysis Workshop 17 (GAW17) provided a platform for evaluating existing statistical genetic methods and for developing novel methods to analyze rare variants that modulate complex traits. In this article, we present an overview of the 1000 Genomes Project exome data and simulated phenotype data that were distributed to GAW17 participants for analyses, the different issues addressed by the participants, and the process of preparation of manuscripts resulting from the discussions during the workshop.

Clinical binary end-point traits are often governed by quantitative precursors. Hence it may be a prudent strategy to analyze a clinical end-point trait by considering a multivariate phenotype vector, possibly including both quantitative and qualitative phenotypes. A major statistical challenge lies in integrating the constituent phenotypes into a reduced univariate phenotype for association analyses. We assess the performances of certain reduced phenotypes using analysis of variance and a model-free quantile-based approach. We find that analysis of variance is more powerful than the quantile-based approach in detecting association, particularly for rare variants. We also find that using a principal component of the quantitative phenotypes and the residual of a logistic regression of the binary phenotype on the quantitative phenotypes may be an optimal method for integrating a binary phenotype with quantitative phenotypes to define a reduced univariate phenotype.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a complex, chronic inflammatory disease implicated to have several plausible candidate loci; however, these may not account for all the genetic variations underlying RA. Common disorders are hypothesized to be highly complex with interaction among genes and other risk factors playing a major role in the disease process. This complexity is further magnified because such interactions may be with or without a strong independent effect and are thus difficult to detect using traditional statistical methodologies. The main challenge to analyze such gene × gene and gene × environment interaction is attributed to a phenomenon referred to as the "curse of dimensionality." Several combinatorial methodologies have been proposed to tackle this analytical challenge. Because quantitative traits underlie complex phenotypes and contain more information on the trait variation within genotypes than qualitative dichotomy, analyzing quantitative traits correlated with the affection status is a more powerful tool for mapping such trait genes. Recently, a generalized multifactor dimensionality reduction method was proposed that allows for adjustment for discrete and quantitative traits and can be used to analyze qualitative and quantitative phenotypes in a population based study design.

In this report, we evaluate the efficiency of the generalized multifactor dimensionality reduction statistical suite to decipher small interacting factors that contribute to RA disease pathogenesis.

Genetic association of population-based quantitative trait data has traditionally been analyzed using analysis of variance (ANOVA). However, violations of certain statistical assumptions may lead to false-positive association results. In this study, we have explored model-free alternatives to ANOVA using correlations between allele frequencies in the different quantile intervals of the quantitative trait and the quantile values. We performed genome-wide association scans on anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide and rheumatoid factor-immunoglobulin M, two quantitative traits correlated with rheumatoid arthritis, using the data provided in Genetic Analysis Workshop 16. Both the quantitative traits exhibited significant evidence of association on Chromosome 6, although not in the human leukocyte antigen region which is known to harbor a major gene predisposing to rheumatoid arthritis. We found that while a majority of the significant findings using the asymptotic thresholds of ANOVA was not validated using permutations, a relatively higher proportion of the significant findings using the asymptotic cut-offs of the correlation statistic were validated using permutations.

Parametric linkage methods for quantitative trait locus mapping require explicit specification of the probability model of the quantitative trait and hence can lead to misleading linkage inferences when the model assumptions are not valid. Ghosh and Majumder developed a nonparametric regression method based on kernel-smoothing for linkage mapping of quantitative trait locus using squared differences in trait values of independent sib pairs, which is relatively more robust than parametric methods with respect to violations in distributional assumptions. In this study, we modify the above mentioned nonparametric regression method by considering local linear polynomials instead of the Nadaraya-Watson estimator and squared sums of sib-pair trait values in addition to squared differences to perform a genome-wide scan of rheumatoid factor-IgM levels on sib pairs in the Genetic Analysis Workshop 15 simulated data set. We obtain significant evidence of linkage very close to the quantitative trait locus controlling for RF-IgM. We find that the simultaneous use of squared differences and squared sums increases the power to detect linkage compared to using only squared differences. However, because of all the sib pairs are selected for rheumatoid arthritis, there is reduced variance of RF-IgM values, and empirical power to detect linkage is not very high. We also compare the performance of our method with two linear regression approaches: the classical Haseman-Elston method using squared sib-pair trait differences and its extension proposed by Elston et al. using mean-corrected sib-pair cross-products. We find that the proposed nonparametric method yields more power than the linear regression approaches.