Leveraging biological pathways and gene networks to understand the genetic architecture of diseases and complex traits

Recent studies have highlighted the role of biological pathways and gene networks in disease biology. In this thesis, we formally assess (1) the contribution of disease-associated gene pathways to disease heritability, (2) the contribution of genes with high network connectivity in known gene networks to disease heritability, and (3) the contribution of genes with high network connectivity to disease-associated gene pathways to disease heritability. We constructed a broad set of pathway, network, and pathway+network annotations and applied stratified LD score regression to 42 independent diseases and complex traits (average N=323K) to identify enriched annotations. We demonstrate gene network connectivity is highly informative for disease architectures, but the information in gene networks may be subsumed by regulatory annotations, such that accounting for known annotations is critical to robust inference of biological mechanisms.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Kim, Samuel Sungil.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Alkes L. Price.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122548

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122548