Genetic distance as an alternative to physical distance for definition of gene units in association studies.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Some association studies, as the implemented in VEGAS, ALIGATOR, i-GSEA4GWAS, GSA-SNP and other software tools, use genes as the unit of analysis. These genes include the coding sequence plus flanking sequences. Polymorphisms in the flanking sequences are of interest because they involve cis-regulatory elements or they inform on untyped genetic variants trough linkage disequilibrium. Gene extensions have customarily been defined as ±50 Kb. This approach is not fully satisfactory because genetic relationships between neighbouring sequences are a function of genetic distances, which are only poorly replaced by physical distances.

Results

Standardized recombination rates (SRR) from the deCODE recombination map were used as units of genetic distances. We searched for

SUBMITTER: Rodriguez-Fontenla C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4048458 | biostudies-literature | 2014 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature