Transcriptome-wide association studies: recent advances in methods, applications and available databases

Abstract

Genome-wide association study has identified fruitful variants impacting heritable traits. Nevertheless, identifying critical genes underlying those significant variants has been a great task. Transcriptome-wide association study (TWAS) is an instrumental post-analysis to detect significant gene-trait associations focusing on modeling transcription-level regulations, which has made numerous progresses in recent years. Leveraging from expression quantitative loci (eQTL) regulation information, TWAS has advantages in detecting functioning genes regulated by disease-associated variants, thus providing insight into mechanisms of diseases and other phenotypes. Considering its vast potential, this review article comprehensively summarizes TWAS, including the methodology, applications and available resources.