Epistasis Blog

From the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Lab at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (www.epistasis.org)

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Using Biological Knowledge to Uncover the Mystery in the Search for Epistasis in Genome-Wide Association Studies

A nice new paper from Marylyn Ritchie on using biological knowledge to aid GWAS analysis of epistasis.

Ritchie MD. Using biological knowledge to uncover the mystery in the search for epistasis in genome-wide association studies. Ann Hum Genet. 2011 Jan;75(1):172-82. [PubMed]

Abstract

The search for the missing heritability in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) has become an important focus for the human genetics community. One suspected location of these genetic effects is in gene-gene interactions, or epistasis. The computational burden of exploring gene-gene interactions in the wealth of data generated in GWAS, along with small to moderate sample sizes, have led to epistasis being an afterthought, rather than a primary focus of GWAS analyses. In this review, I discuss some potential approaches to filter a GWAS dataset to a smaller, more manageable dataset where searching for epistasis is considerably more feasible. I describe a number of alternative approaches, but primarily focus on the use of prior biological knowledge from databases in the public domain to guide the search for epistasis. The manner in which prior knowledge is incorporated into a GWA study can be many and these data can be extracted from a variety of database sources. I discuss a number of these approaches and propose that a comprehensive approach will likely be most fruitful for searching for epistasis in large-scale genomic studies of the current state-of-the-art and into the future.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Does Collocation Inform the Impact of Collaboration?

A very interesting paper from Zak Kohane's group at Harvard.

Lee K, Brownstein JS, Mills RG, Kohane IS (2010) Does Collocation Inform the Impact of Collaboration? PLoS ONE 5(12): e14279. [PLoS One]

Abstract

Background: It has been shown that large interdisciplinary teams working across geography are more likely to be impactful. We asked whether the physical proximity of collaborators remained a strong predictor of the scientific impact of their research as measured by citations of the resulting publications.

Methodology/Principal Findings: Articles published by Harvard investigators from 1993 to 2003 with at least two authors were identified in the domain of biomedical science. Each collaboration was geocoded to the precise three-dimensional location of its authors. Physical distances between any two coauthors were calculated and associated with corresponding citations. Relationship between distance of coauthors and citations for four author relationships (first-last, first-middle, last-middle, and middle-middle) were investigated at different spatial scales. At all sizes of collaborations (from two authors to dozens of authors), geographical proximity between first and last author is highly informative of impact at the microscale (i.e. within building) and beyond. The mean citation for first-last author relationship decreased as the distance between them increased in less than one km range as well as in the three categorized ranges (in the same building, same city, or different city). Such a trend was not seen in other three author relationships.

Conclusions/Significance: Despite the positive impact of emerging communication technologies on scientific research, our results provide striking evidence for the role of physical proximity as a predictor of the impact of collaborations.