Postgwas: advanced GWAS interpretation in R.

Hiersche M, Rühle F, Stoll M

Abstract

We present a comprehensive toolkit for post-processing, visualization and advanced analysis of GWAS results. In the spirit of comparable tools for gene-expression analysis, we attempt to unify and simplify several procedures that are essential for the interpretation of GWAS results. This includes the generation of advanced Manhattan and regional association plots including rare variant display as well as novel interaction network analysis tools for the investigation of systems-biology aspects. Our package supports virtually all model organisms and represents the first cohesive implementation of such tools for the popular language R. Previous software of that range is dispersed over a wide range of platforms and mostly not adaptable for custom work pipelines. We demonstrate the utility of this package by providing an example workflow on a publicly available dataset.