Docker-Implemented Program Streamlines Multiple GWAS Analysis

Abstract:
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been widely used to identify genetic variations associated with phenotypes in a population of individuals. There are many widely used tools such as PLINK, TASSEL, GAPIT, GCTA and FaST-LMM in the field. However, these programs developed in different languages require specific installation and computational environments and the interface is not unified. For users who are not familiar with all tools, it may create barriers and challenges in comparing and validating results reproducibility between tools smoothly. To solve this problem, we proposed the GWASDock, which is a Multi-GWAS Suite including PLINK, TASSEL, GAPIT, GCTA and FaST-LMM to achieve streamlined GWAS analysis. By utilizing Docker, it effectively circumvents software dependency issues and prevents library/version conflicts enabling users to conduct GWAS analysis on different tools easily and efficiently. We tested GWASDock with different datasets and computational platforms and demonstrated its robustness. GWASDock makes comprehensive testing and comparison of different GWAS programs easy and efficient, aiming to speed up the workflow and benefit the broader genomics community. GWASDock is available at https://github.com/ariaydejawad/ GWASDock.