A Genomewide Association Testing Method Incorporating Linkage Disequilibrium

• Activity Number: 13
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 1, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Biopharmaceutical Section
• Author(s): Zheyang Wu*+
• Companies: Worcester Polytechnic Institute
• Keywords: Genome-wide association studies ; Innovated Higher Criticism ; Linkage Disequilibrium ; Genome-wide error control ; Hypothesis test ; Gene detection

Abstract

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) aim to identify genetic variations associated with complex traits. Even with great success, the studies only replicated findings that explain a small proportion of genetic risks for most common diseases. The linkage disequilibrium (LD) among the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) carries important information and has the potential to boost novel and replicable genetic associations. However, both the widely adopted marker-by-marker analysis and many recently proposed genome-wide multiple-marker methods ignore the LD due to technique difficulties. We propose a method to test associations, which exploits the advantage of correlations among SNPs. It is inspired by the Innovated Higher Criticism (Hall and Jin) to detect sparse and weak signals. Our approach provides a higher power of detecting genes while controlling genome-wide errors.