This article is part of the supplement: Genetic Analysis Workshop 15: Gene Expression Analysis and Approaches to Detecting Multiple Functional Loci .

Proceedings

Controlling for false positive findings of trans-hubs in expression quantitative trait loci mapping

Jie Peng^1* , Pei Wang^2* and Hua Tang³

¹  Department of Statistics, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA

²  Public Health Science, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 1100 Fairview Avenue North, Seattle 98109 Washington, USA

³  Department of Genetics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA

author email corresponding author email* Contributed equally

BMC Proceedings 2007, 1(Suppl 1):S157

Published:	18 December 2007

Abstract

In the fast-developing field of expression quantitative traits loci (eQTL) studies, much interest has been concentrated on detecting genomic regions containing transcriptional regulators that influence multiple expression phenotypes (trans-hubs). In this paper, we develop statistical methods for eQTL mapping and propose a new procedure for investigating candidate trans-hubs. We use data from the Genetic Analysis Workshop 15 to illustrate our methods. After correlations among expressions were accounted for, the previously detected trans-hubs are no longer significant. Our results suggest that conclusions regarding regulation hot spots should be treated with great caution.