Longitudinal Genetic Analysis of Complex Traits

• Activity Number: 575
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: ENAR
• Author(s): Ruzong Fan*+
• Keywords: longitudinal analysis ; complex traits ; penalized splines ; linkage disequilibrium ; association mapping ; single nucleotide polymorphisms

Abstract

Longitudinal genetic studies provide a valuable resource for exploring key genetic and environmental factors that affect complex traits over time. Genetic analysis of longitudinal genetic data that incorporates temporal variations is important for understanding genetic architecture and biological variations of common complex diseases. Although they are important, there is a paucity of statistical methods to analyze longitudinal human genetic data. We develop temporal association analysis methods to analyze population longitudinal data. Association mapping models are proposed on the basis of temporal population genetic models for longitudinal qualitative traits of complex traits. We show that the models take both the linkage disequilibrium and temporal trends into account. Penalized spline models are used to estimate the time-dependent mean functions and regression coefficients. Simulation studies were performed to find out that the non-parametric penalized linear model is the best choice in fitting real and simulated data. The research sheds light on the important area of longitudinal genetic analysis, and it provides a basis for future methodological investigations.