GWAS Association to Biological Function

Understanding how to take a GWAS association to a biological understanding can be a complex process. To most of us, this tends to be a bit more of a combination of crafting instincts from available facts than a science.

Now that you have potentially identified a handful of variants of interest (Figure below), what do you do now? You may have to then run additional experiments and fine tune your variant to a gene or biological function. Eddie from Gosia Tryka's group wrote a wonderful review where the figure below is adapted from.

Adapted from Cano-Gamez and Gosia Trynka (2020) Frontiers in Genetics

One of our FinnGen partners, Eric Fauman, has Tweetorials on frequent examples of how you might explore which is the causal gene from a GWAS. We encourage you to check it out for some examples.

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