A systematic analysis of gene-gene interaction in multiple sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis is a complex autoimmune disease which genetic basis has been extensively investigated through genome wide association studies. So far, the conducted studies have detected a number of loci independently associated with the disease but few have investigated the interaction between distant loci, or epistasis. In the present work, we perform a gene level epistasis analysis of multiple sclerosis GWAS from the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium 2. We systematically study the epistatic interactions between all pairs of genes within 19 multiple sclerosis disease maps from the MetaCore pathway database. We report 4 gene pairs with epistasis involving missense variants, and 117 gene pairs with epistasis mediated by eQTLs. Our epistasis analysis is able to retrieve known interactions linked to multiple sclerosis: direct binding interaction between GLI-I and SUFU, involved in oligodendrocyte precursor cells differentiation, and regulation of IP10 transcription by NF-{kappa}B, thus validating the potential of epistasis analysis to reveal biological interaction with relevance in a disease specific context.