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Abstract:
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Once association is detected between a marker and a disease locus, researchers may further investigate the existence of maternal and parent-of-origin (POO) effects. Maternal effect is conventionally modeled as a fixed effect, assuming that maternal variant allele(s) has (have) identical effect on any offspring. The presence within a person of maternal substances, passed from his or her mother during pregnancy, is referred to as maternal microchimerism (MMc). Recent studies reported that levels of MMc vary dramatically from person to person, which could result in heterogeneity of maternal effects. In this report, several methods of detecting POO effect are compared under different scenarios of maternal effects, and a generalized linear model is proposed to incorporate heterogeneous maternal effects in detecting POO effect. The proposed model is evaluated using simulated data.
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