Dear Editor,The standard data analysis of genome-wide association study (GWAS) is based on single SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism),thus it ignores combined effect of modest SNPs/genes.To solve this problem,pathway-based analysis (PBA) has been introduced to GWAS data analysis.PBA aims to identify biological functions and mechanisms associated with complex trait (Wang et al.,2007;Wang et al.,2010).By now it has been one of the key ways to interpret GWAS data (Wang et al.,2010).