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scPrediXcan integrates advances in deep learning and single-cell data into a powerful cell-type-specific transcriptome-wide association study framework

Zhou, Y.; Adeluwa, T.; Zhu, L.; Salazar, S.; Sumner, S.; Kim, H.; Gona, S.; Nyasimi, F.; Kulkarni, R.; Powell, J.; Madduri, R.; Liu, B.; Chen, M.; Im, H. K.

2025-03-04 genetics
10.1101/2024.11.11.623049 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) help identify disease causing genes, but often fail to pinpoint disease mechanisms at the cellular level because of the limited sample sizes and sparsity of cell-type-specific expression data. Here we propose scPrediXcan which integrates state-of-the-art deep learning approaches that predict epigenetic features from DNA sequences with the canonical TWAS framework. Our prediction approach, ctPred, predicts cell-type-specific expression with high accuracy and captures complex gene regulatory grammar that linear models overlook. Applied to type 2 diabetes and systemic lupus erythematosus, scPrediXcan outperformed the canonical TWAS framework by identifying more candidate causal genes, explaining more genome-wide association studies (GWAS) loci, and providing insights into the cellular specificity of TWAS hits. Overall, our results demonstrate that scPrediXcan represents a significant advance, promising to deepen our understanding of the cellular mechanisms underlying complex diseases.

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