Multi-ancestry gene expression models amplify transcriptome-wide association study discovery and validation
摘要
Our understanding of the influence of ancestral background on genetically determined expression remains limited, especially when gene expression models are applied to studies from different or multiple populations. We perform transcriptome-wide association studies of 6 psychiatric conditions, leveraging gene expression models trained in cohorts with different proportions of African, European, and Indigenous American genetic ancestries. For comparison, we repeat each transcriptome-wide association study using a model trained in individuals of predominantly European ancestry. We identify 1416 statistically significant gene-level associations (false discovery rate adjusted p < 0.05) across the 6 diagnoses, of which 62% are uniquely detected by the admixed gene models. Notably, we observe high correlation (