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Understanding the causal relationship between genotype and phenotype is a major objective in biology. The main interest is in understanding trait architecture and identifying loci contributing to the respective traits. Genome-wide association mapping (GWAS) is one tool to elucidate these relationships and has been successfully used in many different species. However, most studies concentrate on marginal marker effects and ignore epistatic and gene-environment interactions. These interactions are problematic to account for, but are likely to make major contributions to many phenotypes that are not regulated by independent genetic effects, but by more sophisticated gene-regulatory networks. Further complication arises from the fact that these networks vary in different natural accessions. However, understanding the differences of gene regulatory networks and gene-gene interactions is crucial to conceive trait architecture and predict phenotypes.
The basic subject of this study – using data from the Arabidopsis 1001 Genomes Project – is the analysis of pre-mature stop codons. These have been incurred in nearly one-third of the ~ 30k genes. A gene-gene interaction network of the co-occurrence of stop codons has been built and the over and under representation of different pairs has been statistically analyzed. To further classify the significant over and under- represented gene-gene interactions in terms of molecular function of the encoded proteins, gene ontology terms (GO-SLIM) have been applied. Furthermore, co- expression analysis specifies gene clusters that co-occur over different genetic and phenotypic backgrounds. To link these patterns to evolutionary constrains, spatial location of the respective alleles have been analyzed as well. The latter shows clear patterns for certain gene pairs that indicate differential selection.
The abundance of high-quality genotype and phenotype data for the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana enables scientists to study the genetic architecture of many complex traits at an unprecedented level of detail using genome-wide association studies (GWAS). GWAS have been a great success in A. thaliana and many SNP-trait associations have been published. With the AraGWAS Catalog (https://aragwas.1001genomes.org) we provide a publicly available, manually curated and standardized GWAS catalog for all publicly available phenotypes from the central A. thaliana phenotype repository, AraPheno. All GWAS have been recomputed on the latest imputed genotype release of the 1001 Genomes Consortium using a standardized GWAS pipeline to ensure comparability between results. The catalog includes currently 167 phenotypes and more than 222 000 SNP-trait associations with P < 10\(^{-4}\), of which 3887 are significantly associated using permutation-based thresholds. The AraGWAS Catalog can be accessed via a modern web-interface and provides various features to easily access, download and visualize the results and summary statistics across GWAS.