The consent forms for each study specifically grant permission for participants' data and samples to be shared between studies, both current and past/future.
Methodology to enable meta-analysis of rare variant association tests [ 48 50], by combining summary statistics across GWAS, would be expected to increase power but may be complicated by the observation that lower-frequency variation is more likely to be population-specific and, thus, may not be shared between studies, particularly in a trans-ethnic context.
However, there is a common pattern in the biological functions that are associated with genes that are shared between studies.
Although these two sets of samples differed in age, in infectious dose and in stages of disease development, many differentially regulated genes were expected to be shared between these two studies.
Despite using similar datasets, the number of in silico derived genes with GBM-specific isoforms varied and only three genes were found to be shared between two of the five studies: AP2A1, CPNE1 and KPNB1 [ 14, 15, 17, 26, 27].
Encrypted anonymised findings from the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands will be shared between the researchers undertaking this study in parallel in order to gain a wider international perspective and to subject the data to an ethical analysis (see next section).
Two of the elements that were found to be shared between humans and chimps in the original study were also found in the gorilla [ 14], suggesting the subfamily arose before the divergence of gorillas from chimpanzees and humans, approximately seven million years ago.
Moreover, this may suggest that the regulation pattern of these group of genes may have an effect on the result of gene expression and may be more universal, therefore likely to be shared between other species not included in this study.
It is a surprise that relatively few differentially regulated genes are shared between these studies [11], [12], [13], [16], [59], [60].
