TY - JOUR AU - Li, Lin AU - Kabesch, Michael AU - Bouzigon, Emmanuelle AU - Demenais, Florence AU - Farrall, Martin AU - Moffatt, Miriam AU - Lin, Xihong AU - Liang, Liming PY - 2013 M3 - Original Research TI - Using eQTL weights to improve power for genome-wide association studies: a genetic study of childhood asthma JO - Frontiers in Genetics UR - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2013.00103 VL - 4 SN - 1664-8021 N2 - Increasing evidence suggests that single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with complex traits are more likely to be expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs). Incorporating eQTL information hence has potential to increase power of genome-wide association studies (GWAS). In this paper, we propose using eQTL weights as prior information in SNP based association tests to improve test power while maintaining control of the family-wise error rate (FWER) or the false discovery rate (FDR). We apply the proposed methods to the analysis of a GWAS for childhood asthma consisting of 1296 unrelated individuals with German ancestry. The results confirm that eQTLs are enriched for previously reported asthma SNPs. We also find that some SNPs are insignificant using procedures without eQTL weighting, but become significant using eQTL-weighted Bonferroni or Benjamini–Hochberg procedures, while controlling the same FWER or FDR level. Some of these SNPs have been reported by independent studies in recent literature. The results suggest that the eQTL-weighted procedures provide a promising approach for improving power of GWAS. We also report the results of our methods applied to the large-scale European GABRIEL consortium data. ER -