Advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies have revealed the important genomic regulatory role played by non-coding regions in gene transcriptional activity. The Transcriptome-Wide Association Study (TWAS), developed in 2005, is a data integration bioinformatics approach designed to identify genes that result in complex traits due to gene-regulated transcriptional activity. TWAS uses expression prediction models from genotypes trained on expression reference panels, such as eQTL (expression quantitative trait loc) cohorts with expression and genotype data, to discover gene-trait associations from GWAS datasets. 

• Ashley Hutt
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