Novel bioinformatics approach to investigate quantitative phenotype - genotype associations in 1 neuroimaging studies

36 Imaging genetics is an emerging field in which the association between genes and neuroimaging37 based quantitative phenotypes are used to explore the functional role of genes in neuroanatomy and 38 neurophysiology in the context of healthy function and neuropsychiatric disorders. The main obstacle 39 for researchers in the field is the high dimensionality of the data in both the imaging phenotypes and 40 the genetic variants commonly typed. In this article, we develop a novel method that utilizes Gene 41 Ontology, an online database, to select and prioritize certain genes, employing a stratified false 42 discovery rate (sFDR) approach to investigate their associations with imaging phenotypes. sFDR has 43 the potential to increase power in genome wide association studies (GWAS), and is quickly gaining 44 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/015065 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Feb. 10, 2015;