The Open Targets Post-GWAS analysis pipeline

MOTIVATION: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are a powerful method to detect even weak associations between variants and phenotypes, however many of the identified associated variants are in non-coding regions, and presumably influence gene expression regulation. Identifying potential drug targets, i.e. causal protein-coding genes, therefore requires crossing the genetics results with functional data. RESULTS: We present a novel data integration pipeline, that feeds into an interactive data resource, that analyses GWAS results in the light of experimental epigenetic and cis-regulatory datasets, such as ChIP-Seq, Promoter Capture Hi-C or eQTL, and presents them in a single report, which can be used for inferring likely causal genes. AVAILABILITY: The analysis code is available at www.github.com/Ensembl/postgap, and the interactive data browser at postgwas.opentargets.io.