C

Christiaan de Leeuw

Amsterdam Neuroscience

ORCID: 0000-0003-1076-9828

Publishes on Genetic Associations and Epidemiology, Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks, Genetic Mapping and Diversity in Plants and Animals. 152 papers and 25.5k citations.

152Publications
25.5kTotal Citations

Is this you? Claim your profile.

Add your photo, update your bio, and get notified when your ranking changes.

Top publicationsby citations

MAGMA: Generalized Gene-Set Analysis of GWAS Data
Christiaan de Leeuw, Joris M. Mooij, Tom Heskes et al.|PLoS Computational Biology|2015
Cited by 4kOpen Access

By aggregating data for complex traits in a biologically meaningful way, gene and gene-set analysis constitute a valuable addition to single-marker analysis. However, although various methods for gene and gene-set analysis currently exist, they generally suffer from a number of issues. Statistical power for most methods is strongly affected by linkage disequilibrium between markers, multi-marker associations are often hard to detect, and the reliance on permutation to compute p-values tends to make the analysis computationally very expensive. To address these issues we have developed MAGMA, a novel tool for gene and gene-set analysis. The gene analysis is based on a multiple regression model, to provide better statistical performance. The gene-set analysis is built as a separate layer around the gene analysis for additional flexibility. This gene-set analysis also uses a regression structure to allow generalization to analysis of continuous properties of genes and simultaneous analysis of multiple gene sets and other gene properties. Simulations and an analysis of Crohn's Disease data are used to evaluate the performance of MAGMA and to compare it to a number of other gene and gene-set analysis tools. The results show that MAGMA has significantly more power than other tools for both the gene and the gene-set analysis, identifying more genes and gene sets associated with Crohn's Disease while maintaining a correct type 1 error rate. Moreover, the MAGMA analysis of the Crohn's Disease data was found to be considerably faster as well.

Genome-wide association study identifies 30 loci associated with bipolar disorder
Eli A. Stahl, Gerome Breen, Andreas J. Forstner et al.|Nature Genetics|2019
Cited by 1.6kOpen Access

) in the discovery GWAS were not genome-wide significant in the combined analysis, consistent with small effect sizes and limited power but also with genetic heterogeneity. In the combined analysis, 30 loci were genome-wide significant, including 20 newly identified loci. The significant loci contain genes encoding ion channels, neurotransmitter transporters and synaptic components. Pathway analysis revealed nine significantly enriched gene sets, including regulation of insulin secretion and endocannabinoid signaling. Bipolar I disorder is strongly genetically correlated with schizophrenia, driven by psychosis, whereas bipolar II disorder is more strongly correlated with major depressive disorder. These findings address key clinical questions and provide potential biological mechanisms for bipolar disorder.