TSEA-DB: a trait-tissue association map for human complex traits and diseases.

Assessing the causal tissues of human traits and diseases is important for better interpreting trait-associated genetic variants, understanding disease etiology, and improving treatment strategies. Here, we present a reference database for trait-associated tissue specificity based on genome-wide association study (GWAS) results, named Tissue-Specific Enrichment Analysis DataBase (TSEA-DB, available at https://bioinfo.uth.edu/TSEADB/). We collected GWAS summary statistics data for a wide range of human traits and diseases followed by rigorous quality control. The current version of TSEA-DB includes 4423 data sets from the UK Biobank (UKBB) and 596 from other resources (GWAS Catalog and literature mining), totaling 5019 unique GWAS data sets and 15 770 trait-associated gene sets. TSEA-DB aims to provide reference tissue(s) enriched with the genes from GWAS. To this end, we systematically performed a tissue-specific enrichment analysis using our recently developed tool deTS and gene expression profiles from two reference tissue panels: the GTEx panel (47 tissues) and the ENCODE panel (44 tissues). The comprehensive trait-tissue association results can be easily accessed, searched, visualized, analyzed, and compared across the studies and traits through our web site. TSEA-DB represents one of the many timely and comprehensive approaches in exploring human trait-tissue association.