Multiethnic genetic association studies improve power for locus discovery.

ABSTRACT: To date, genome-wide association studies have focused almost exclusively on populations of European ancestry. These studies continue with the advent of next-generation sequencing, designed to systematically catalog and test low-frequency variation for a role in disease. A complementary approach would be to focus further efforts on cohorts of multiple ethnicities. This leverages the idea that population genetic drift may have elevated some variants to higher allele frequency in different populations, boosting statistical power to detect an association. Based on empirical allele frequency distributions from eleven populations represented in HapMap Phase 3 and the 1000 Genomes Project, we simulate a range of genetic models to quantify the power of association studies in multiple ethnicities r

SUBMITTER: Pulit SL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2935880 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature