PINES: phenotype-informed tissue weighting improves prediction of pathogenic noncoding variants

Abstract Functional characterization of the noncoding genome is essential for biological understanding of gene regulation and disease. Here, we introduce the computational framework PINES (Phenotype-Informed Noncoding Element Scoring), which predicts the functional impact of noncoding variants by in...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Corneliu A. Bodea, Adele A. Mitchell, Alex Bloemendal, Aaron G. Day-Williams, Heiko Runz, Shamil R. Sunyaev
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: BMC 2018-10-01
Series:Genome Biology
Subjects:
Online Access:http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-018-1546-6
Description
Summary:Abstract Functional characterization of the noncoding genome is essential for biological understanding of gene regulation and disease. Here, we introduce the computational framework PINES (Phenotype-Informed Noncoding Element Scoring), which predicts the functional impact of noncoding variants by integrating epigenetic annotations in a phenotype-dependent manner. PINES enables analyses to be customized towards genomic annotations from cell types of the highest relevance given the phenotype of interest. We illustrate that PINES identifies functional noncoding variation more accurately than methods that do not use phenotype-weighted knowledge, while at the same time being flexible and easy to use via a dedicated web portal.
ISSN:1474-760X