• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
• /
• v.13 no.5
• /
• pp.2031-2037
• /
• 2012

Background: Analysis of gene-gene and gene-environment interactions for complex multifactorial human disease faces challenges regarding statistical methodology. One major difficulty is partly due to the limitations of parametric-statistical methods for detection of gene effects that are dependent solely or partially on interactions with other genes or environmental exposures. Based on our previous case-control study in Chongqing of China, we have found increased risk of colorectal cancer exists in individuals carrying a novel homozygous TT at locus rs1329149 and known homozygous AA at locus rs671. Methods: In this study, we proposed statistical method-crossover analysis in combination with logistic regression model, to further analyze our data and focus on assessing gene-environmental interactions for colorectal cancer. Results: The results of the crossover analysis showed that there are possible multiplicative interactions between loci rs671 and rs1329149 with alcohol consumption. Multifactorial logistic regression analysis also validated that loci rs671 and rs1329149 both exhibited a multiplicative interaction with alcohol consumption. Moreover, we also found additive interactions between any pair of two factors (among the four risk factors: gene loci rs671, rs1329149, age and alcohol consumption) through the crossover analysis, which was not evident on logistic regression. Conclusions: In conclusion, the method based on crossover analysis-logistic regression is successful in assessing additive and multiplicative gene-environment interactions, and in revealing synergistic effects of gene loci rs671 and rs1329149 with alcohol consumption in the pathogenesis and development of colorectal cancer.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
• /
• v.49 no.5
• /
• pp.253-259
• /
• 2016

Objectives: Central obesity plays a major role in the development of many chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease and cancer. Chronic stress may be involved in the pathophysiology of central obesity. Although several large-scale genome-wide association studies have reported susceptibility genes for central adiposity, the effects of interactions between genes and psychosocial stress on central adiposity have rarely been examined. A recent study focusing on Caucasians discovered the novel gene early B-cell factor 1 (EBF1), which was associated with central obesity-related traits via interactions with stress levels. We aimed to evaluate EBF1 gene-by-stress interaction effects on central adiposity traits, including visceral adipose tissue (VAT), in Korean adults. Methods: A total of 1467 Korean adults were included in this study. We selected 22 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the EBF1 gene and analyzed their interactions with stress on central adiposity using additive, dominant, and recessive genetic modeling. Results: The four SNPs that had strong linkage disequilibrium relationships (rs10061900, rs10070743, rs4704967, and rs10056564) demonstrated significant interactions with the waist-hip ratio in the dominant model ($p_{int}$<0.007). In addition, two other SNPs (rs6556377 and rs13180086) were associated with VAT by interactions with stress levels, especially in the recessive genetic model ($p_{int}$<0.007). As stress levels increased, the mean values of central adiposity traits according to SNP genotypes exhibited gradual but significant changes (p<0.05). Conclusions: These results suggest that the common genetic variants for EBF1 are associated with central adiposity through interactions with stress levels, emphasizing the importance of managing stress in the prevention of central obesity.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
• /
• v.42 no.6
• /
• pp.356-359
• /
• 2009

In the more than 100 genome wide association studies (GWAS) conducted in the past 5 years, more than 250 genetic loci contributing to more than 40 common diseases and traits have been identified. Whilst many genes have been linked to a trait, both their individual and combined effects are small and unable to explain earlier estimates of heritability. Given the rapid changes in disease incidence that cannot be accounted for by changes in diagnostic practises, there is need to have well characterized exposure information in addition to genomic data for the study of gene-environment interactions. The case-control and cohort study designs are most suited for studying associations between risk factors and occurrence of an outcome. However, the case control study design is subject to several biases and hence the preferred choice of the prospective cohort study design in investigating geneenvironment interactions. A major limitation of utilising the prospective cohort study design is the long duration of follow-up of participants to accumulate adequate outcome data. The GWAS paradigm is a timely reminder for traditional epidemiologists who often perform one- or few-at-a-time hypothesis-testing studies with the main hallmarks of GWAS being the agnostic approach and the massive dataset derived through large-scale international collaborations.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
• /
• v.16 no.3
• /
• pp.227-232
• /
• 2010

In this paper we consider the multi-robot system that collects target objects spread in an unexplored environment. The robots cooperate each other to improve the capability and the efficiency. The robots attract or intimidate each other as behaviors of bacterial swarms or particles with electrical moments. The interactions would increase the working efficiency in some environments but it would decrease the efficiency in some other environments. Therefore, the system needs to adapt to the working environment by adjusting the strengths of the interactions. The strengths of the interactions are expressed as sets of gene codes that mean the weights of each kind of attracting or intimidating vectors. The proposed system adjusts the gene codes using evolutional strategy. The proposed approach has been validated by computer simulation. The results of this paper show that our inter-swarm interacting strategy and optimizing algorithm improves the working efficiency, adaptively to the characteristics of environments.

• Genomics & Informatics
• /
• v.20 no.1
• /
• pp.8.1-8.14
• /
• 2022

Despite the success of recent genome-wide association studies investigating longitudinal traits, a large fraction of overall heritability remains unexplained. This suggests that some of the missing heritability may be accounted for by gene-gene and gene-time/environment interactions. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian variable selection method for longitudinal genetic data based on mixed models. The method jointly models the main effects and interactions of all candidate genetic variants and non-genetic factors and has higher statistical power than previous approaches. To account for the within-subject dependence structure, we propose a grid-based approach that models only one fixed-dimensional covariance matrix, which is thus applicable to data where subjects have different numbers of time points. We provide the theoretical basis of our Bayesian method and then illustrate its performance using data from the 1000 Genome Project with various simulation settings. Several simulation studies show that our multivariate method increases the statistical power compared to the corresponding univariate method and can detect gene-time/ environment interactions well. We further evaluate our method with different numbers of individuals, variants, and causal variants, as well as different trait-heritability, and conclude that our method performs reasonably well with various simulation settings.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
• /
• v.24 no.5
• /
• pp.861-869
• /
• 2011

One of the main objects of recent genetic studies is to understand genetic factors that induce complex diseases. If there are interactions between loci, it is difficult to find such associations through a single-locus analysis strategy. Thus we need to consider the gene-gene interactions and/or gene-environment interactions. The MDR(multifactor dimensionality reduction) method is being used frequently; however, it is not appropriate to detect interactions caused by a small fraction of the possible genotype pairs. In this study, we propose a relative risk interaction explorer that detects interactions through the calculation of the relative risks between the control and disease groups from each genetic combinations. For illustration, we apply this method to MDR open source data. We also compare the MDR and the proposed method using the simulated data eight genetic models.

• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
• /
• v.29 no.1
• /
• pp.65-83
• /
• 2022

Although various statistical methods have been developed to map time-dependent genetic factors, most identified genetic variants can explain only a small portion of the estimated genetic variation in longitudinal traits. Gene-gene and gene-time/environment interactions are known to be important putative sources of the missing heritability. However, mapping epistatic gene-gene interactions is extremely difficult due to the very large parameter spaces for models containing such interactions. In this paper, we develop a Gaussian process (GP) based nonparametric Bayesian variable selection method for longitudinal data. It maps multiple genetic markers without restricting to pairwise interactions. Rather than modeling each main and interaction term explicitly, the GP model measures the importance of each marker, regardless of whether it is mostly due to a main effect or some interaction effect(s), via an unspecified function. To improve the flexibility of the GP model, we propose a novel grid-based method for the within-subject dependence structure. The proposed method can accurately approximate complex covariance structures. The dimension of the covariance matrix depends only on the number of fixed grid points although each subject may have different numbers of measurements at different time points. The deviance information criterion (DIC) and the Bayesian predictive information criterion (BPIC) are proposed for selecting an optimal number of grid points. To efficiently draw posterior samples, we combine a hybrid Monte Carlo method with a partially collapsed Gibbs (PCG) sampler. We apply the proposed GP model to a mouse dataset on age-related body weight.

• Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry
• /
• v.17 no.2
• /
• pp.65-69
• /
• 2010

Gene-environment interactions are important in pathogenesis of suicide or suicidal behavior. Twin and adoption studies and family studies show that genetic factors play a critical role in suicide or suicidal behavior. Given the strong association between serotonergic neurotransmission and suicide, recent molecular genetic studies have focused on polymorphisms of serotonin genes, especially on serotonin transporter and tryptophan hydroxylase genes. Some studies have revealed a significant interaction between s allele of the serotonin transporter gene and the risk of suicide attempt associated with childhood trauma. In addition, the polymorphism of brain-derived neurotrophic factor gene also may influence the effect of childhood trauma in relation to the risk of attempting suicide. Future studies should explore genetic and environmental factors in suicide or suicidal behavior and examine for gene and environment interaction.

• Proceedings of the Korea Society of Environmental Toocicology Conference
• /
• 2002.05a
• /
• pp.48-48
• /
• 2002

• Proceedings of the Korean Statistical Society Conference
• /
• 2005.11a
• /
• pp.31-36
• /
• 2005

An identification and characterization of susceptibility genes for common complex multifactorial diseases is a challengeable task, in which the effect of single genetic variation will be likely dependent on other genetic variations(gene-gene interaction) and environmental factors (gene-environment interaction). To address is issue, the multifactor dimensionality reduction (MDR) has been proposed and implemented by Ritchie et al. (2001), Moore et al. (2002), Hahn et al.(2003) and Ritchie et al. (2003). With MDR, multilocus genotypes effectively reduce the dimension of genotype predictors from n to one, which improves the identification of polymorphism combinations associated with disease risk. However, MDR cannot handle missing observations appropriately, in which missing observation is treated as an additional genotype category. This approach may suffer from a sparseness problem since when high-order interactions are considered, an additional missing category would make the contingency table cells more sparse. We propose a new MDR approach with minimum loss of sample sizes by considering missing data over all possible multifactor classes. We evaluate the proposed MDR by using the prediction errors and cross validation consistency.