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Summary: Am. J. Hum. Genet. 66:279292, 2000
279
A General Test of Association for Quantitative Traits in Nuclear Families
G. R. Abecasis, L. R. Cardon, and W. O. C. Cookson
The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford
Summary
High-resolution mapping is an important step in the
identification of complex disease genes. In outbred pop-
ulations, linkage disequilibrium is expected to operate
over short distances and could provide a powerful fine-
mapping tool. Here we build on recently developed
methods for linkage-disequilibrium mapping of quan-
titative traits to construct a general approach that can
accommodate nuclear families of any size, with or with-
out parental information. Variance components are used
to construct a test that utilizes information from all
available offspring but that is not biased in the presence
of linkage or familiality. A permutation test is described
for situations in which maximum-likelihood estimates
of the variance components are biased. Simulation stud-
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