Methods development for "Omics" data

National Institute Of Environmental Health Sciences

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

We advanced methods for identifying candidate genetic variants involved in gene-environment-interactions (GEI) for both continuous and binary traits. These approaches are undergoing large-scale testing and validation using the NIH Biowulf high-performance computing cluster and genetic data from UK Biobank. To support reproducibility and accessibility, we have already established infrastructure to host curated variant lists for approximately 3,000 traits. Given the computational burden of GEI analyses in binary traits, we developed new regression software, FASTReg, that accelerates logistic regression by up to two orders of magnitude. FASTReg is openly available on GitHub and is currently being extended with additional functionality to broaden its applications in large-scale genetic and exposomic studies.