文摘
BackgroundMeta-analysis is essential to the discovery of rare variants that influence complex diseases and traits. Four major software packages, namely MASS, MetaSKAT, RAREMETAL, and seqMeta, have been developed to perform meta-analysis of rare-variant associations. These packages first generate summary statistics for each study and then perform the meta-analysis by combining the summary statistics. Because of incompatible file formats and non-equivalent summary statistics, the output files from the study-level analysis of one package cannot be directly used to perform meta-analysis in another package.