Abstract
Genetic variation in response to the environment, that is, genotype-by-environment interaction (GxE), is fundamental in the biology of complex traits and diseases. However, existing methods are computationally demanding and infeasible to handle biobank-scale data. Here, we introduce GxEsum, a method for estimating the phenotypic variance explained by genome-wide GxE based on GWAS summary statistics. Through comprehensive simulations and analysis of UK Biobank with 288,837 individuals, we show that GxEsum can handle a large-scale biobank dataset with controlled type I error rates and unbiased GxE estimates, and its computational efficiency can be hundreds of times higher than existing GxE methods.
14 Keywords
- Algorithms
- Biological Specimen Banks
- Body Mass Index
- Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2
- Gene-Environment Interaction
- Genetic Variation
- Genome, Human
- Genome-Wide Association Study
- Genotype
- Humans
- Hypertension
- Models, Genetic
- Multifactorial Inheritance
- Quantitative Trait, Heritable