Prioritization of Candidate Nonsynonymous Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms via Sequence Conservation Features

The Detection of rare variants responsible for human complex diseases has been receiving more and more attentions. However, most existing computational methods for this purpose require the selection of functional variants before statistical analysis. Based on the assumption that nonsynonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (nsSNPs) associated with specific diseases should be similar in their properties, we propose a method that utilize conservation scores of nsSNPs and the guilt-by-association principle to prioritize the candi-date nsSNPs for specific diseases. Systematic validation demonstrates that our approach is effective in recovering the relationship between nsSNPs and diseases, with the Manhattan distance measure achieving the most precise prediction results.