METAL

Description

metal website  

METAL is a tool for meta-analysis genomewide association scans. METAL can combine either (a) test statistics and standard errors or (b) p-values across studies (taking sample size and direction of effect into account). METAL analysis is a convenient alternative to a direct analysis of merged data from multiple studies. It is especially appropriate when data from the individual studies cannot be analyzed together because of differences in ethnicity, phenotype distribution, gender or constraints in sharing of individual level data imposed. Meta-analysis results in little or no loss of efficiency compared to analysis of a combined dataset including data from all individual studies.

Required Modules

Serial

• metal

System Variables

• HPC_{{#uppercase:metal}}_DIR - installation directory
• HPC_{{#uppercase:metal}}_BIN - executable directory
• HPC_{{#uppercase:metal}}_DOC - documentation directory
• HPC_{{#uppercase:metal}}_EX - example data directory

Citation

If you publish research that uses metal you have to cite it as follows:

METAL was developed by Goncalo Abecasis, Yun Li and Cristen Willer (manuscript available here). The first version was developed in 2007 and was used for the analyses presented in Sanna et al (2008) and Willer et al (2008).