Genome-Wide Network-Assisted Association and Enrichment Study on CSF t-tau

Some genetic variants have been discovered to associated with cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in Alzheimer's disease, yet it does not adapt with the small effect risk variants and ignores the inter-relationship among loci and outer-relationship with environment. As an alternative strategy, functional network-based and pathway-based information could be involved in high-level variants identify process, from system biology view. On the basis of genome-wide association analysis, a weighted-adjusted PageRank network function module mining strategy was proposed to analysis CSF t-tau, which was arranged as a measure reflecting the early pathological characteristics of Alzheimer's disease. The strategy can not only excavate widely studied t-tau-related genetic variations, but also can excavate subnetworks enriched in pathways, such as neurodegenerative diseases, nervous system and signal transduction. It indicates that, subnetworks identified by the strategy have a certain functional relationship with t-tau at the system biology level.