GBAT: a gene-based association test for robust detection of trans-gene regulation

Abstract The observation that disease-associated genetic variants typically reside outside of exons has inspired widespread investigation into the genetic basis of transcriptional regulation. While associations between the mRNA abundance of a gene and its proximal SNPs ( cis -eQTLs) are now readily identified, identification of high-quality distal associations ( trans -eQTLs) has been limited by a heavy multiple testing burden and the proneness to false-positive signals. To address these issues, we develop GBAT, a powerful gene-based pipeline that allows robust detection of high-quality trans -gene regulation signal.