Accurate discovery of expression quantitative trait loci under confounding from spurious and genuine regulatory hotspots.

ABSTRACT: In genomewide mapping of expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL), it is widely believed that thousands of genes are trans-regulated by a small number of genomic regions called "regulatory hotspots," resulting in "trans-regulatory bands" in an eQTL map. As several recent studies have demonstrated, technical confounding factors such as batch effects can complicate eQTL analysis by causing many spurious associations including spurious regulatory hotspots. Yet little is understood about how these technical confounding factors affect eQTL analyses and how to correct for these factors. Our analysis of data sets with biological replicates suggests that it is this intersample correlation structure inherent in expression data that leads to spurious associations between genetic loci and a large nu

SUBMITTER: Kang HM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2600931 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature