Genetic interrogator for Neuroimaging: Streamlining Genetic-Based Insights of Human Brain Variation

COEX 

Identifying the degree to which the genetic architecture of brain structure and function derived from brain imaging features overlap with other brain-based traits is important for understanding overlapping neurobiological mechanisms. Pre-assembled pipelines for post-GWAS analyses, such as CTG-VL[1] can help with efficient processing, but have not been developed to specifically test for genetic relationships and enrichment against brain-related traits. Toolboxes from abagen[2] and ENIGMA[3] integrate brain gene-expression across different atlases but do not take GWAS summary statistics as input. Here we present GiNi (Genetic interrogator for Neuroimaging) a Python-based command line tool, to streamline a comprehensive collection of statistical genetic relationships between multiple brain-based traits. We include heritability estimates, global and local genetic correlation, and causal genetic associations and enrichment across various brain regions, tissues and cell types.