Studies on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have amassed substantial evidence for the role of genetics in the disease's phenotypic manifestation. A large number of coding and non-coding variants with low penetrance likely act in a combinatorial manner to explain the variable forms of ASD. However, many of these combined interactions, both additive and epistatic, remain undefined. Coalitional game theory (CGT) is an approach that seeks to identify players (individual genetic variants or genes) who tend to improve the performance-association to a disease phenotype of interest-of any coalition (subset of co-occurring genetic variants) they join. This method has been previously applied to boost biologically informative signal from gene expression data and exome sequencing data but remains to be explored in the context of cooperativity among non-coding genomic regions. We describe our extension of previous work, highlighting non-coding chromosomal regions relevant to ASD using CGT on alteration data of 4595 fully sequenced genomes from 756 multiplex families. Genomes were encoded into binary matrices for three types of non-coding regions previously implicated in ASD and separated into ASD (case) and unaffected (control) samples. A player metric, the Shapley value, enabled determination of individual variant contributions in both sets of cohorts. A total of 30 non-coding positions were found to have significantly elevated player scores and likely represent significant contributors to the genetic coordination underlying ASD. Cross-study analyses revealed that a subset of mutated non-coding regions (all of which are in human accelerated regions (HARs)) and related genes are involved in biological pathways or behavioral outcomes known to be affected in autism, suggesting the importance of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within HARs in ASD. These findings support the use of CGT in identifying hidden yet influential non-coding players from large-scale genomic data, to better understand the precise underpinnings of complex neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.
Pubmed ID: 30886520 RIS Download
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Database as central repository for both single base nucleotide substitutions and short deletion and insertion polymorphisms. Distinguishes report of how to assay SNP from use of that SNP with individuals and populations. This separation simplifies some issues of data representation. However, these initial reports describing how to assay SNP will often be accompanied by SNP experiments measuring allele occurrence in individuals and populations. Community can contribute to this resource.
View all literature mentionsCentral online repository for microRNA nomenclature, sequence data, annotation and target prediction.Collection of published miRNA sequences and annotation.
View all literature mentionsSoftware repository for R packages related to analysis and comprehension of high throughput genomic data. Uses separate set of commands for installation of packages. Software project based on R programming language that provides tools for analysis and comprehension of high throughput genomic data.
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