2025-12-09 12:00:00 -0500 EST
New work led by Boyang Fu introducing FAME, a scalable method for detecting epistasis in biobank-scale data.
A biobank-scale test of marginal epistasis reveals genome-wide signals of polygenic epistasis
The contribution of genetic interactions (epistasis) to human complex trait variation remains poorly understood due, in part, to the statistical and computational challenges involved in testing for interaction effects. We introduce FAME (FAst Marginal Epistasis test), a method that can test for marginal epistasis of a single-nucleotide polymorphism on a quantitative trait. FAME is computationally efficient, enabling tests of marginal epistasis on biobank-scale data. Applying FAME to GWAS-significant trait-SNP associations across 53 quantitative traits and approximately 300,000 unrelated White British individuals in the UK Biobank, we identified 16 significant marginal epistasis signals across 12 traits.