Tanya Phung, a post-doctoral researcher working in the group of Professor Danielle Posthuma, has been awarded a Proof of Concept (PoC) grant for €55.000 from Amsterdam Neuroscience.
With this grant support, she will explore how to enhance candidate gene targets selection by integrating quantitative trait loci (QTLs) and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) data.
Background: Despite the success of GWAS in identifying thousands of genetic variants associated with complex traits, we are still not closer to the quest of narrowing down the targets for therapeutics design. One issue is that an association at the gene level is not enough evidence for the gene to actually cause disease because transcription and/or translation might not be affected. To help pinpoint candidate genes, QTL mapping is used to narrow down GWAS variants that are associated with expression, methylation, or protein levels. With this grant support, Tanya aims to build a web-platform in order to aggregate available QTLs data and to implement state-of-the-art methods for integrating QTLs and GWAS. While this work focuses on QTLs, it will be a foundation for integrating multiple levels of omics data in the future.