GSA-SNP: a general approach for gene set analysis of polymorphisms

Genome-wide association (GWA) study aims to identify the genetic factors associated with the traits of interest. However, the power of GWA analysis has been seriously limited by the enormous number of markers tested. Recently, the gene set analysis (GSA) methods were introduced to GWA studies to address the association of gene sets that share common biological functions. GSA considerably increased the power of association analysis and successfully identified coordinated association patterns of gene sets. There have been several approaches in this direction with some limitations. Here, we present a general approach for GSA in GWA analysis and a stand-alone software GSA-SNP that implements three widely used GSA methods. GSA-SNP provides a fast computation and an easy-to-use interface. The software and test datasets are freely available at http://gsa.muldas.org. We provide an exemplary analysis on adult heights in a Korean population.