epistasis

Hemani G, Shakhbazov K, Westra H-J, Esko T, Henders AK, McRae AF, Yang J, Gibson G, Martin NG, Metspalu A, Franke L, Montgomery GW, Visscher PM & Powell JE 2014 Hemani et al. reply. Nature 514:E5-E6.

• replying to A. R. Wood et al.
• weaker interaction effects remain for 24/26 epistasis pairs after correcting for effects of the IncSeq SNP
• for the remaining two pairs (at CSTB and LAX1) we cannot rule out a haplotype effect such as postulated by Wood et al.
• this may indeed be a more parsimonious explanation for these two pairs

• we did not report that epistasis was widespread and pointed out that for gene expression additive genetic variation explains much more of the total genetic variation than non-additive variation