DESE: estimating driver tissues by selective expression of genes associated with complex diseases or traits

The driver tissues or cell types in which susceptibility genes initiate diseases remain elusive. We develop a unified framework to detect the causal tissues of complex diseases or traits according to selective expression of disease-associated genes in genome-wide association studies (GWASs). This framework consists of three components which run iteratively to produce a converged prioritization list of driver tissues. Additionally, this framework also outputs a list of prioritized genes as a byproduct. We apply the framework to six representative complex diseases or traits with GWAS summary statistics, which leads to the estimation of the lung as an associated tissue of rheumatoid arthritis. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s13059-019-1801-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.