A computational approach to identify blood cell-expressed Parkinson's disease biomarkers that are coordinately expressed in brain tissue

Identification of genes whose regulation of expression is functionally similar in both brain tissue and blood cells could in principle enable monitoring of significant neurological traits and disorders by analysis of blood samples. We thus employed transcriptional analysis of pathologically affected tissues, using agnostic approaches to identify overlapping gene functions and integrating this transcriptomic information with expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) data. Here, we estimate the correlation of gene expression in the top-associated cis-eQTLs of brain tissue and blood cells in Parkinson's Disease (PD). We introduced quantitative frameworks to reveal the complex relationship of various biasing genetic factors in PD, a neurodegenerative disease. We examined gene expression microarray and RNA-Seq datasets from human brain and blood tissues from PD-affected and…