Summary
Objectives:
Simultaneous dealing of hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms
(SNPs) in genome-wide association studies is laborious. The aim of our study is to
develop a method to decrease the number of candidate SNPs prior to the genotyping
of study subjects.
Methods:
We created virtual genotype data on case and control subjects from data of the International
HapMap Project by using haplotype-based simulation method. We repeated virtual case-control
association studies and selected candidate SNPs. We applied the selected SNPs to previously
published genetic casecontrol studies. Sensitivity to detect association with causative
genes using our method was compared to the original studies and results using tag
SNPs.
Results:
We found a discrete distribution pattern of SNPs, which was able to produce significant
results in case-control association studies. The number of candidate SNPs that we
selected was 24.7% of the number of the original set of SNPs. We applied this method
to previously published genetic case-control studies and found that the use of candidate
SNPs improved the sensitivity for detecting significant alleles, both compared to
the original studies and to the use of tag SNPs. The results were not affected by
the difference of the diseases and genes involved.
Conclusions:
Our simulation-based approach has advantages of reducing costs and improving performance
to detect significant alleles. This method can be used without considering the specific
disease and genes involved.
Keywords
Single nucleotide polymorphism - haplotypes - genotypes - case-control studies