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A resource-efficient tool for mixed model association analysis of large-scale data

Nature Genetics volume 51, pages 1749–1755 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

The genome-wide association study (GWAS) has been widely used as an experimental design to detect associations between genetic variants and a phenotype. Two major confounding factors, population stratification and relatedness, could potentially lead to inflated GWAS test statistics and hence to spurious associations. Mixed linear model (MLM)-based approaches can be used to account for sample structure. However, genome-wide association (GWA) analyses in biobank samples such as the UK Biobank (UKB) often exceed the capability of most existing MLM-based tools especially if the number of traits is large. Here, we develop an MLM-based tool (fastGWA) that controls for population stratification by principal components and for relatedness by a sparse genetic relationship matrix for GWA analyses of biobank-scale data. We demonstrate by extensive simulations that fastGWA is reliable, robust and highly resource-efficient. We then apply fastGWA to 2,173 traits on array-genotyped and imputed samples from 456,422 individuals and to 2,048 traits on whole-exome-sequenced samples from 46,191 individuals in the UKB.

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Fig. 1: Median λ of null variants under different simulation scenarios.
Fig. 2: Mean χ2 of causal variants under different simulation scenarios.
Fig. 3: Estimates of genetic variance by fastGWA and BOLT-LMM for 24 traits in the UKB.

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Data availability

The individual-level genotype and phenotype data are available through formal application to the UK Biobank (http://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk). All the summary-level statistics are available at our data portal (http://cnsgenomics.com/software/gcta/#DataResource). Source data for Extended Data Figs. 1–3 are available online.

Code availability

fastGWA is available at http://cnsgenomics.com/software/gcta/#fastGWA. The fastGWA online tool was built on the code modified from the PheWeb project (https://github.com/statgen/pheweb/).

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Acknowledgements

We thank H. Wang and J. Sidorenko for assistance in data preparation, A. McRae for organizing computing resources, P.-R. Loh for constructive comments on the manuscript, L. Yengo for helpful discussion, the Neale Lab for making the data processing pipelines publicly available, and Alibaba Cloud Australia and New Zealand for hosting the online tool. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council (DP160101343, DP160101056, FT180100186, and FL180100072), the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (1078037, 1078901, 1113400, and 1107258), and the Sylvia & Charles Viertel Charitable Foundation. This study makes use of data from the UK Biobank (project ID: 12514). A full list of acknowledgements relating to this data set can be found in the Supplementary Note.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Longda Jiang, Zhili Zheng.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Longda Jiang, Zhili Zheng, Ting Qi, Kathryn E. Kemper, Naomi R. Wray, Peter M. Visscher & Jian Yang

  2. Institute for Advanced Research, Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China

    Zhili Zheng & Jian Yang

  3. Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Naomi R. Wray

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Contributions

J.Y. conceived and supervised the study. J.Y., L.J., and Z.Z. designed the experiment. Z.Z. developed the software tools. L.J. and Z.Z. performed the simulations and data analyses under the assistance and guidance from J.Y., P.M.V., T.Q., N.R.W., and K.E.K. P.M.V., N.R.W., and J.Y. contributed resources and funding. L.J. and J.Y. wrote the manuscript with the participation of all authors. All authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jian Yang.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Comparison between fastGWA-REML and AI-REML.

The phenotypes were simulated based on real genotypes of 100,000 individuals from the UKB with Vg = 0.4 (see part 5 of the Supplementary Note for details of the simulation method and data). Plotted are the \(\hat \sigma _g^2\) values estimated by fastGWA-REML against those estimated by the AI-REML in GCTA. Each dot represents one simulation replicate (100 simulations in total). The Pearson’s correlation coefficient of \(\hat \sigma _g^2\) between the two methods is >0.9999.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 2 Comparison between the approximate and exact fastGWA tests.

We selected four quantitative traits from the UKB for comparison, including height (HT, nHT = 455,332), forced expiratory volume in 1-second (FEV, nFEV = 415,931), pulse rate (PR, nPR = 149,082), and educational attainment (EA, nEA = 304,998) (see Supplementary Table 4 for more information about the traits). Plotted are the estimated variant effects (a) or χ2-statistics (b) of 8,531,416 variants computed by the exact fastGWA method (fastGWA-Exact) against those by the fastGWA test using the GRAMMAR-GAMMA approximation (see part 2 of the Supplementary Note for details). The Pearson’s correlation coefficients of the estimated variant effect or χ2-statistic between the two methods are > 0.9999 for all the four traits.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 3 The first and second principal components (PC1 and PC2) of all of the UKB participants of European ancestry (n = 456,422) compared to their self-reported ethnicity.

The red dots represent those individuals who self-reported as ‘British’, the green dots represent those who self-reported as ‘Irish’, and the purple dots represent those who self-reported as ‘other-white background’.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 4 Comparison of \(\hat \sigma _g^2\) estimated by fastGWA-REML to that estimated by BOLT-REML (used in BOLT-LMM) at different degrees of relatedness in simulations.

The x-axis represents different degrees of relatedness with (0, 0) representing no common environmental effect, (1st, 0.1Vp) or (1st, 0.2Vp) representing common environmental effects explaining 10% or 20% of the phenotypic variance (Vp) among 1st degree relatives, (≥2nd, 0.1Vp) or (≥2nd, 0.2Vp) representing common environmental effects explaining 10% or 20% of Vp among all pairs of the 1st and 2nd degree relatives, and (≥2nd, Gradient) representing common environmental effects explaining 20% of Vp among the 1st degree relatives and 10% of Vp among the 2nd degree relatives. The y-axis represents the value of \(\hat \sigma _g^2\). The black dashed line represents the true simulation parameter (h2 = 0.4). Each boxplot represents the distribution of \(\hat \sigma _g^2\) across 100 simulation replicates. The line inside each box indicates the median value, notches indicate the 95% confidence interval of the median, the central box indicates the interquartile range (IQR), and whiskers indicate data up to 1.5 times the IQR. We also show the Haseman–Elston (HE) regression estimate of \(\sigma _g^2\) in the fastGWA model, with a gray bar to indicate its expected value computed using the approximation theory presented in part 9 of the Supplementary Note.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Comparison of false positive rate (FPR) among different association methods.

We used the simulated data as presented in Figs. 1 and 2 to compute the FPR of each association method across different simulation scenarios with different levels of common environmental effects. Each boxplot represents the distribution of FPR across 100 simulation replicates. The line inside each box indicates the median value, notches indicate the 95% confidence interval of the median, the central box indicates the interquartile range (IQR), whiskers indicate data up to 1.5 times the IQR and outliers are shown as separate dots. In each simulation replicate, the P value of each variant was calculated based on the reported effect estimate and s.e. using a \(\chi _{df = 1}^2\) test.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Genomic inflation and power of fastGWA with the sparse GRM thresholded at different genetic relatedness cut-off values.

This simulation was performed based on real genotypes from the UKB (see simulation settings in part 5 of the Supplementary Note). We constructed different sparse GRMs by setting off-diagonal elements below a certain threshold (varying from 0.03 to 0.10) to 0 and performed fastGWA analyses using these sparse GRMs. Each boxplot represents the distribution of estimates (that is, median λ, or mean χ2) across 100 simulation replicates. The line inside each box indicates the median value, notches indicate the 95% confidence interval of the median, the central box indicates the interquartile range (IQR), and whiskers indicate data up to 1.5 times the IQR.

Extended Data Fig. 7 Comparison of genomic inflation and power between fastGWA, fastGWA-LOCO, and fastGWA-Ped.

Shown are the results from the analyses of a simulated data set based on the simulation strategy described in part 5 of the Supplementary Note (with \(\sigma _g^2 = 0.4V_p\), \(\sigma _c^2 = 0.1V_p,\,or\,0.2V_p\) for all 1st and 2nd relatives and \(\sigma _c^2 = 0\) for all unrelated individuals). We did not observe any increase in power when applying the LOCO scheme to fastGWA because fastGWA estimates pedigree relatedness by a sparse GRM, to model phenotypic covariance between close relatives due to genetic and/or common environmental effects, and the pedigree relatedness estimated using all autosomes are similar to those using 21 chromosomes under the LOCO scheme. Each boxplot represents the distribution of estimates (that is, median λ, or mean χ2) across 100 simulation replicates. The line inside each box indicates the median value, notches indicate the 95% confidence interval of the median, the central box indicates the interquartile range (IQR), and whiskers indicate data up to 1.5 times the IQR.

Extended Data Fig. 8 Comparison of genomic inflation between BOLT-LMM (estimating the variance components only once using all variants) and BOLT-LMM_fine-tuning (re-estimating the variance components when a chromosome is left out).

The simulation setting was the same as the (0, 0) scenario in Fig. 1. The median λ was computed at the null variants. Each boxplot represents the distribution of median λ across 100 simulation replicates. The line inside each box indicates the median value, notches indicate the 95% confidence interval of the median, the central box indicates the interquartile range (IQR), and whiskers indicate data up to 1.5 times the IQR.

Extended Data Fig. 9 Genomic inflation of BOLT-LMM-Mix using LD score based on different LD window sizes and references.

a, Results from simulations based on the simulated genotype data (part 5 of the Supplementary Note) using the same setting as in the (0, 0) case in Fig. 1. The LD scores were computed from the sample using three window sizes; that is, 1 Mb (BOLT-LMM-Mix_wind-1Mb), 10 Mb (BOLT-LMM-Mix_wind-10Mb), and 20 Mb (BOLT-LMM-Mix_wind-20Mb). b, Results from simulations based on real genotypes (part 5 of the Supplementary Note) using the same settings as in the (0, 0) and (≥2nd, 0.1Vp) cases in Fig. 1. Two sets of LD score were tested; LD scores computed from the sample using a window size of 1 Mb (BOLT-LMM-Mix_UKB-LDsc) and LD scores obtained from the BOLT-LMM website (BOLT-LMM-Mix_provided-LDsc). Each boxplot represents the distribution of estimates (that is, median λ, or mean χ2) across 100 simulation replicates. The line inside each box indicates the median value, notches indicate the 95% confidence interval of the median, the central box indicates the interquartile range (IQR), and whiskers indicate data up to 1.5 times the IQR.

Extended Data Fig. 10 Comparison between the reported genetic relatedness and the SNP-derived genetic relatedness of the UKB participants.

The y-axis represents the SNP-derived genetic relatedness computed from GCTA using 565,631 common variants on HapMap3 (175,708 individual pairs with estimated genetic relatedness ≥ 0.05). The x-axis represents the expected genetic relatedness based on the pedigree information provided by the UKB (monozygotic twin, 1; parent-offspring/full sib, 0.5; second degree relatives, 0.25; third degree relatives, 0.125; and unlabelled pair, ‘none’) on x-axis. Each circle represents one pair of relatives, the dashed diagonal line represents y = x, and the red horizontal lines represent the mean value of each relatedness group.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figures 1–10, Notes 1–11 and Tables 1–8

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Source data

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 1

The statistical source data to generate Figure 1.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 2

The statistical source data to generate Figure 2.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 3

The statistical source data to generate Figure 3.

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Jiang, L., Zheng, Z., Qi, T. et al. A resource-efficient tool for mixed model association analysis of large-scale data. Nat Genet 51, 1749–1755 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-019-0530-8

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