A genome-wide multiphenotypic association analysis identified candidate genes and gene ontology shared by four common risky behaviors

Background: Risky behaviors can lead to huge economic and health losses. However, limited efforts are paid to explore the genetic mechanisms of risky behaviors. Result: MASH analysis identified a group of target genes for risky behaviors, such as APBB2, MAPT and DCC. For GO enrichment analysis, FUMA detected multiple risky behaviors related GO terms and brain related diseases, such as regulation of neuron differentiation (adjusted P value = 2.84×10(-5)), autism spectrum disorder (adjusted P value =1.81×10(-27)) and intelligence (adjusted P value =5.89×10(-15)). Conclusion: We reported multiple candidate genes and GO terms shared by the four risky behaviors, providing novel clues for understanding the genetic mechanism of risky behaviors. Methods: Multivariate Adaptive Shrinkage (MASH) analysis was first applied to the GWAS data of four specific risky behaviors (automobile speeding, drinks per week, ever-smoker, number of sexual partners) to detect the common genetic variants shared by the four risky behaviors. Utilizing genomic functional annotation data of SNPs, the SNPs detected by MASH were then mapped to target genes. Finally, gene set enrichment analysis of the identified candidate genes were conducted by the FUMA platform to obtain risky behaviors related gene ontology (GO) terms as well as diseases and traits, respectively.