GWAtoolbox: an R package for fast quality control and handling of genome-wide association studies meta-analysis data.

Abstract

The GWAtoolbox is an R package that standardizes and accelerates the handling of data from genome-wide association studies (GWAS), particularly in the context of large-scale GWAS meta-analyses. A key feature of GWAtoolbox is its ability to perform quality control (QC) of any number of files in a matter of minutes. The implemented workflow has been structured to check three particular data quality aspects: (i) data formatting, (ii) quality of the GWAS results and (iii) data consistency across studies. Output consists of an extensive list of quality statistics and plots which allow inspection of individual files and between-study comparison to identify systematic bias. http://www.eurac.edu/GWAtoolbox cfuchsb@umich.edu; daniel.taliun@eurac.edu Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.