Integration of a priori gene set information into genome-wide association studies

In genome-wide association studies (GWAS) genetic markers are often ranked to select genes for further pursuit. Especially for moderately associated and interrelated genes, information on genes and pathways may improve the selection. We applied and combined two main approaches for data integration to a GWAS for rheumatoid arthritis, gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) and hierarchical Bayes prioritization (HBP). Many associated genes are located in the HLA region on 6p21. However, the ranking lists of genes and gene sets differ considerably depending on the chosen approach: HBP changes the ranking only slightly and primarily contains HLA genes in the top 100 gene lists. GSEA includes also many non-HLA genes.