Multi-ancestry transcriptome prediction with functionally informed variants in TOPMed MESA improves performance of transcriptome-wide association studies

We proposed methods leveraging functionally informed variants for multi-ancestry transcriptome prediction and demonstrated improvements on multi-ancestry TWAS performance. Our proposed omnibus approach, which aggregates TWAS results, further improves TWAS power. The observed TWAS improvement depends on the GWAS trait’s relevance to peripheral blood mononuclear cells used to build our models.