Prioritizing genetic variants for causality on the basis of preferential linkage disequilibrium.

ABSTRACT: To date, the widely used genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of the human genome have reported thousands of variants that are significantly associated with various human traits. However, in the vast majority of these cases, the causal variants responsible for the observed associations remain unknown. In order to facilitate the identification of causal variants, we designed a simple computational method called the "preferential linkage disequilibrium (LD)" approach, which follows the variants discovered by GWASs to pinpoint the causal variants, even if they are rare compared with the discovery variants. The approach is based on the hypothesis that the GWAS-discovered variant is better at tagging the causal variants than are most other variants evaluated in the original GWAS. Applying th

SUBMITTER: Zhu Q 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3511993 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature