Genome-wide gene-gene interaction analysis of rheumatoid arthritis

There is a growing consideration that gene-gene interactions may play important roles in complex diseases etiology. The simultaneous genotyping of hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) have provided an excellent chance to study genetic epidemiology from molecular network. In this paper, we performed genome-wide gene-gene interaction associated with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) using RA datasets provided by the Genetic Analysis Workshop 15 (GAW 15) Problem 2. The results reported here that there were 14 significant SNP-SNP pairs associated with RA and the interaction between rs744877 and rs238510 was the strongest SNP-SNP pair contributing to disease with the maximal interaction score defined in our paper.