  The vast majority of connections between complex disease and common genetic
variants were identified through meta-analysis, a powerful approach that
enables large samples sizes while protecting against common artifacts due to
population structure, repeated small sample analyses, and/or limitations with
sharing individual level data. As the focus of genetic association studies
shifts to rare variants, genes and other functional units are becoming the unit
of analysis. Here, we propose and evaluate new approaches for meta-analysis of
rare variant association. We show that our approach retains useful features of
single variant meta-analytic approaches and demonstrate its utility in a study
of blood lipid levels in ~18,500 individuals genotyped with exome arrays.
