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Matti Pirinen

Publications and source records attributed to Matti Pirinen.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Whole genome view of the consequences of a population bottleneck using 2926 genome sequences from Finland and United Kingdom

Isolated populations with enrichment of variants due to recent population bottlenecks provide a powerful resource for identifying disease-associated genetic variants and genes. As a model of an isolate population, we sequenced the genomes of 1463 Finnish individuals as part of the Sequencing Initiative Suomi (SISu) Project. We compared the genomic profiles of the 1463 Finns to a sample of 1463 British individuals that were sequenced in parallel as part of the UK10K Project. Whereas there were no major differences in the allele frequency of common variants, a significant depletion of variants in the rare frequency spectrum was observed in Finns when comparing the two populations. On the other hand, we observed >2.1 million variants that were twice as frequent among Finns compared to Britons and 800,000 variants that were more than 10 times more frequent in Finns. Furthermore, in Finns we observed a relative proportional enrichment of variants in the minor allele frequency range between 2 - 5% (p < 2.2x10-16). When stratified by their functional annotations, loss-of-function (LoF) variants showed the highest proportional enrichment in Finns (p = 0.0291). In the noncoding part of the genome, variants in conserved regions (p = 0.002) and promoters (p = 0.01) were also significantly enriched in the Finnish samples. These functional categories represent the highest a priori power for downstream association studies of rare variants using population isolates.

Genetics

FINEMAP: Efficient variable selection using summary data from genome-wide association studies

MotivationThe goal of fine-mapping in genomic regions associated with complex diseases and traits is to identify causal variants that point to molecular mechanisms behind the associations. Recent fine-mapping methods using summary data from genome-wide association studies rely on exhaustive search through all possible causal configurations, which is computationally expensive.\n\nResultsWe introduce FINEMAP, a software package to efficiently explore a set of the most important causal configurations of the region via a shotgun stochastic search algorithm. We show that FINEMAP produces accurate results in a fraction of processing time of existing approaches and is therefore a promising tool for analyzing growing amounts of data produced in genome-wide association studies.\n\nAvailabilityFINEMAP v1.0 is freely available for Mac OS X and Linux at http://www.christianbenner.com.\n\nContact: christian.benner@helsinki.fi, matti.pirinen@helsinki.fi

Genetics

metaCCA: Summary statistics-based multivariate meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies using canonical correlation analysis

A dominant approach to genetic association studies is to perform univariate tests between genotype-phenotype pairs. However, analysing related traits together increases statistical power, and certain complex associations become detectable only when several variants are tested jointly. Currently, modest sample sizes of individual cohorts and restricted availability of individual-level genotype-phenotype data across the cohorts limit conducting multivariate tests.\n\nWe introduce metaCCA, a computational framework for summary statistics-based analysis of a single or multiple studies that allows multivariate representation of both genotype and phenotype. It extends the statistical technique of canonical correlation analysis to the setting where original individual-level records are not available, and employs a covariance shrinkage algorithm to achieve robustness.\n\nMultivariate meta-analysis of two Finnish studies of nuclear magnetic resonance metabolomics by metaCCA, using standard univariate output from the program SNPTEST, shows an excellent agreement with the pooled individual-level analysis of original data. Motivated by strong multivariate signals in the lipid genes tested, we envision that multivariate association testing using metaCCA has a great potential to provide novel insights from already published summary statistics from high-throughput phenotyping technologies.\n\nCode is available at https://github.com/aalto-ics-kepaco.

Bioinformatics

Assessing allele specific expression across multiple tissues from RNA-seq read data

Motivation: RNA sequencing enables allele specific expression (ASE) studies that complement standard genotype expression studies for common variants and, importantly, also allow measuring the regulatory impact of rare variants. The Genotype-Tissue Expression project (GTEx) is collecting RNA-seq data on multiple tissues of a same set of individuals and novel methods are required for the analysis of these data. Results: We present a statistical method to compare different patterns of ASE across tissues and to classify genetic variants according to their impact on the tissue-wide expression profile. We focus on strong ASE effects that we are expecting to see for protein-truncating variants, but our method can also be adjusted for other types of ASE effects. We illustrate the method with a real data example on a tissue-wide expression profile of a variant causal for lipoid proteinosis, and with a simulation study to assess our method more generally. Availability: MAMBA software: http://birch.well.ox.ac.uk/~rivas/mamba/ R source code and data examples: http://www.iki.fi/mpirinen/ Contact: matti.pirinen@helsinki.fi rivas@well.ox.ac.uk

Bioinformatics