Multi-phenotype methodology on complex human traits and multi-omics for prediction of health and disease

Overview

This event will feature two talks:

Multi-phenotype methodology to improve discovery and inference of the genetic architecture of complex human traits

Speaker: Dr Marika Kaakinen, University of Surrey

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been successful in discovering genetic variants associated with thousands of human traits. However, such an approach applied in the traditional sense, i.e. one trait at a time, ignores the correlation between the studied traits. Moreover, correlated traits often share underlying pathways and genetic variants within the pathways. Multi-phenotype GWAS addresses this issue by jointly modelling multiple traits at a time. However, expanding the analysis to high-dimensional data often leads to more sever missing data issues. In this talk I will describe the methods I have developed and contributed to through examples of application to metabolic and psychiatric traits. I will also discuss the challenges in using such approaches, including missing phenotype imputation for high-dimensional data.

Multi-omics for prediction of health and disease, and the role for gut microbiome

Speaker: Dr Ayse Demirkan, University of Surrey

The investigation of the growing population human genetics and lifestyle is in high demand. It is clear now that the more information we obtain, the clearer picture about chronic illnesses predisposition and progression stages we might get. However, the relationship between genetic, environmental, or lifestyle factors is still being investigated. Microbiomics, together with other omics type research is a rapidly developing field where all microorganisms of a given community are studied together. Among the mostly studied, the human microbiome is most often understood as the bacterial community. Under the influence of various factors, the composition of the human microbiota associates and influences diseases. In the section of statistical multi-omics we currently focus on two different projects on gut microbiome, one to elucidate risk factors for Parkinson Disease, and one to describe the associations with markers of health and lifestyle in the Atlas Biomed Cohort.