SparkINFERNO: a scalable high-throughput pipeline for inferring molecular mechanisms of non-coding genetic variants.

Summary: We report Spark-based INFERence of the molecular mechanisms of NOn-coding genetic variants (SparkINFERNO), a scalable bioinformatics pipeline characterizing non-coding genome-wide association study (GWAS) association findings. SparkINFERNO prioritizes causal variants underlying GWAS association signals and reports relevant regulatory elements, tissue contexts and plausible target genes they affect. To achieve this, the SparkINFERNO algorithm integrates GWAS summary statistics with large-scale collection of functional genomics datasets spanning enhancer activity, transcription factor binding, expression quantitative trait loci and other functional datasets across more than 400 tissues and cell types.