Title: Multilocus association analysis under polygenic models

Authors: Jurg Ott; Dandan Sun

Addresses: Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 4A Datun Road, Beijing 100101, China ' Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No.7 Bei Tu Cheng West Road, Beijing 100029, China

Abstract: For each variant in a genome-wide association study, the risk allele is the one with an odds ratio greater than 1. For a given set of variants, the number of risk alleles in cases minus that in controls is evaluated and a p-value is obtained for this difference. Successive sums of these differences over the best 2, 3, etc. variants and associated p-values are obtained. The smallest such p-value is our genome-wide test statistic, for which an empirical significance level is obtained by permutation analysis. Applied to disease datasets, our approach furnishes significant results even with little single-locus effects.

Keywords: polygenic traits; emergenesis; emergenic traits; epistatic interactions; schizophrenia; genome-wide association study; GWAS; risk alleles; bioinformatics; multilocus association analysis.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDMB.2012.049302

International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, 2012 Vol.6 No.5, pp.482 - 489

Received: 04 May 2011
Accepted: 04 May 2011
Published online: 17 Dec 2014 *

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