GWAS

sPLINK (safe PLINK) allows the federated, privacy-preserving analysis of GWAS data. It works on distributed datasets without exchanging raw data and is robust against imbalanced phenotype distributions across cohorts. Federated and user-friendly analysis with sPLINK, thus, has the potential to replace meta-analysis as the gold standard for collaborative GWAS. The tool is available online [here](https://www.exbio.wzw.tum.de/splink/).

We tackle the challenge of higher-order epistasis detection using biological networks to narrow the search space and GPU computing to improve the efficiency. Phenotype-specific epistasis-modules extracted from larger networks will help to better understand the underlying biological mechanisms of different phenotypes.