Open AccessProceedings Detection of susceptibility loci by genome-wide linkage analysis

The objective of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of a model-free linkage statistics for finding evidence of linkage using two different maps and to illustrate how the comparison of results from several populations might provide insight into the underlying genetic etiology of the disease of interest. The results obtained in terms of detection of the risk loci and threshold for declaring linkage and power are very similar for a dense SNP map and a sparser microsatellite map. The populations differed in terms of family ascertainment and diagnosis criteria, leading to different power to detect the individual underlying disease loci. Our results for the individual replicates are consistent with the disease model used in the simulation. Background The Genetic Analysis Workshop 14 (GAW14) simulated problem provided family data ascertained in four differ-ent populations. All members of the family were typed both with a relatively sparse map of microsatellites, and a denser map of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The objective of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of a model-free linkage statistics for finding evidence of link-age in the different populations using the two different maps. We also show how the comparison of several diag-nostic criteria can provide clues to the underlying genetic model. This study was performed blind to the genetic model used to simulate the data provided