Single nucleotide polymorphism barcoding to evaluate oral cancer risk using odds ratio-based genetic algorithms

Abstract

Cancers often involve the synergistic effects of gene–gene interactions, but identifying these interactions remains challenging. Here, we present an odds ratio-based genetic algorithm (OR-GA) that is able to solve the problems associated with the simultaneous analysis of multiple independent single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are associated with oral cancer. The SNP interactions between four SNPs—namely rs1799782, rs2040639, rs861539, rs2075685, and belonging to four genes (XRCC1, XRCC2, XRCC3, and XRCC4)—were tested in this study, respectively. The GA decomposes the SNPs sets into different SNP combinations with their corresponding genotypes (called SNP barcodes). The GA can effectively identify a specific SNP barcode that has an optimized fitness value and uses this to calculate the difference between the case and control groups. The SNP barcodes with a low fitness value are naturally removed from the population. Using two to four SNPs, the best SNP barcodes with maximum differences in occurrence between the case and control groups were generated by GA algorithm. Subsequently, the OR provides a quantitative measure of the multiple SNP synergies between the oral cancer and control groups by calculating the risk related to the best SNP barcodes and others. When these were compared to their corresponding non-SNP barcodes, the estimated ORs for oral cancer were found to be great than 1 [approx. 1.72–2.23; confidence intervals (CIs): 0.94–5.30, p < 0.03–0.07] for various specific SNP barcodes with two to four SNPs. In conclusion, the proposed OR-GA method successfully generates SNP barcodes, which allow oral cancer risk to be evaluated and in the process the OR-GA method identifies possible SNP–SNP interactions.