1

What my team can offer The International HapMap Project was designed to create a genome-wide database of patterns of human genetic variation, with the expectation that these patterns would be useful for genetic association studies of common diseases. This expectation has already been fulfilled with just the initial output of genome-wide association studies, identifying nearly 100 loci for nearly 40 common diseases and traits (Manolio et al 2008). Genetic association studies can therefore be considered central to efforts to identify and characterize genomic variants that underly susceptibility to complex disease (Van Steen et al 2005). We offer guidance and support to increase the success rate of your genetic association studies, in several areas including: • Study design (e.g. subject selection: family- or population-based, variant or marker selection) • Study implementation (e.g. sample-recruitment strategy) • Power calculations • Quality control of the data used for association analysis: Detection of genotyping error (e.g. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, Mendelia