Introduction
Transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) is a powerful strategy used for elucidating the biological mechanisms of genetic variants. However, TWAS analyses are still daunting due to the complication of the cis-eQTL mapping and TWAS software pipelines. Farm animals are major protein sources and biological models for humans. Many studies reported the similarity in the genetic effect across species. But no web server is available to conduct TWAS analyses for animals to date. Here, we developed an interactive and easy-to-use web server named FarmGTEx TWAS-server (refer to as TWAS-server), integrating expression data of 49, 34, and 23 tissues for humans, pigs, and cattle, respectively. And three popular software packages (S-PrediXcan, TWAS-FUSION, UTMOST) were provided for customized TWAS. A total of 21,037 and 17,942 distinct eGenes of pigs and cattle were provided. Incidentally, 479203, 1208 and 657 tissue-gene pairs associated with diseases/traits of humans, cattle, and pigs detected by S-PrediXcan could be obtained from the server. Users can also conduct the gene expression level prediction, GWAS statistics imputation, and GSEA as well. In summary, TWAS-server is a one-stop solution performing TWAS analyses for users without program skills, and a diverse resource as well. Furthermore, we have prepared two Dell servers (Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6130 CPU, 128 CPUs, 512 GB RAM) to support the operation of the TWAS-server. The TWAS-server operates on a computational cluster managed through the Slurm workload management system, which minimizes the risk of server crashes. Tasks exceeding the system's immediate capacity are placed in a queue.
