Advances in Bioinformatics
Volume 2008 (2008), Article ID 719818, 6 pages
doi:10.1155/2008/719818
Research Article
Comparing Quantitative Trait Loci and Gene Expression Data
1RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA 90407, USA
2Department of Statistics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
3Department of Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21201, USA
4The Laboratory of Neurobiology and Behavior, Rockefeller University, New York, NY 10065, USA
5Department of Biobehavioral Health, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
6Center for Developmental and Health Genetics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
Received 18 February 2008; Revised 27 May 2008; Accepted 10 July 2008
Academic Editor: Rainer Spang
Copyright © 2008 Bing Han et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
We develop methods to compare the positions of quantitative trait loci (QTL) with a set of genes selected by other methods, such as microarray experiments, from a sequenced genome. We apply our methods to QTL for addictive behavior in mouse, and a set of genes upregulated in a region of the brain associated with addictive behavior, the nucleus accumbens (NA). The association between the QTL and NA genes is not significantly stronger than expected by chance. However, chromosomes 2 and 16 do show strong associations suggesting that genes on these chromosomes might be associated with addictive behavior. The statistical methodology developed for this study can be applied to similar studies to assess the mutual information in microarray and QTL analyses.