GxG-Viztool: A program for visualizing gene-gene interactions in genetic association analysis

Abstract

Gene-gene interactions are important factors underlying a common complex trait that is mostly polygenic. While many methods have been proposed to analyze gene-gene interactions in genetic association studies, the interpretation of the identified gene-gene interactions is not straightforward. In order to aid the interpretation of gene-gene interactions, we developed the GxG-Viztool, an executable program for visualizing gene-gene interactions in genetic association analysis. The GxG-Viztool provides an effective way to recognize genotype combinations that enhance/repress a trait and to display polygenic structure of interactions. The GxG-Viztool implements six graphical tools: checkerboard, pairwise checkerboard, forest, funnel, 3D lattice and parallel coordinate plots, which make it effective to recognize certain patterns in gene-gene interactions. It is freely available at http ://bibs. snu. ac. kr/GxG-Viz tool.