About the Authors

Yin-Ping Zhang

cathyzh@mail.xjtu.edu.cn (Y-PZ); hdeng2@tulane.edu (H-WD)

Affiliation Key Laboratory of Environment and Genes Related to Diseases, Ministry of Education, College of Medicine, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, P. R. China

Fei-Yan Deng

Affiliation Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States of America

Tie-Lin Yang

Affiliation The Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering, Ministry of Education and Institute of Molecular Genetics, School of Life Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, P. R. China

Feng Zhang

Affiliation Key Laboratory of Environment and Genes Related to Diseases, Ministry of Education, College of Medicine, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, P. R. China

Xiang-Ding Chen

Affiliation Laboratory of Molecular and Statistical Genetics, College of Life Sciences, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, P. R. China

Hui Shen

Affiliation Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States of America

Xue-Zheng Zhu

Affiliation Center of Systematic Biomedical Research, Shanghai University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, P. R. China

Qing Tian

Affiliation Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States of America

Hong-Wen Deng

cathyzh@mail.xjtu.edu.cn (Y-PZ); hdeng2@tulane.edu (H-WD)

Affiliations Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States of America, The Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering, Ministry of Education and Institute of Molecular Genetics, School of Life Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, P. R. China, Laboratory of Molecular and Statistical Genetics, College of Life Sciences, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, P. R. China, Center of Systematic Biomedical Research, Shanghai University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, P. R. China

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: H-WD Y-PZ. Performed the experiments: Y-PZ F-YD T-LY X-DC HS X-ZZ. Analyzed the data: FZ QT. Wrote the paper: Y-PZ H-WD.