Introduction

SNPsea is an algorithm to identify cell types and pathways likely to be affected by risk loci. It requires a list of SNP identifiers and a matrix of genes and conditions.

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have discovered multiple genomic loci associated with risk for different types of disease. SNPsea provides a simple way to determine the types of cells influenced by genes in these risk loci.

Suppose disease-associated alleles influence a small number of pathogenic cell types. We hypothesize that genes with critical functions in those cell types are likely to be within risk loci for that disease. We assume that a gene’s specificity to a cell type is a reasonable indicator of its importance to the unique function of that cell type.

First, we identify the genes in linkage disequilibrium (LD) with the given trait-associated SNPs and score the gene set for specificity to each cell type. Next, we define a null distribution of scores for each cell type by sampling random SNP sets matched on the number of linked genes. Finally, we evaluate the significance of the original gene set’s specificity by comparison to the null distributions: we calculate an exact permutation p-value.

SNPsea is a general algorithm. You may provide your own:

  1. Continuous gene matrix with gene expression profiles (or other values).
  2. Binary gene annotation matrix with presence/absence 1/0 values.

We provide you with three expression matrices and one annotation matrix. See Data.

The columns of the matrix may be tissues, cell types, GO annotation codes, or other conditions.

Note

Continuous matrices must be normalized before running SNPsea. That is, columns must be directly comparable to each other. For example, you might consider quantile normalization.

If you benefit from this method, please cite:

See the first description of the algorithm and additional examples here:

Hu, X. et al. Integrating autoimmune risk loci with gene-expression data identifies specific pathogenic immune cell subsets. The American Journal of Human Genetics 89, 496–506 (2011).