%0 Journal Article
%T Enhanced genetic maps from family-based disease studies: population-specific comparisons
%A Chunsheng He
%A Daniel E Weeks
%A Steven Buyske
%A Goncalo R Abecasis
%A William C Stewart
%A Tara C Matise
%A The Enhanced Map Consortium
%J BMC Medical Genetics
%D 2011
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2350-12-15
%X We collected a large sample of uncleaned genotype data for 461 markers generated by the MGS using the Weber screening sets 9 and 10. This collection includes genotypes for over 4,400 pedigrees containing over 17,000 genotyped individuals from different populations. We identified and cleaned numerous relationship and genotyping errors, as well as verified the marker orders. We used this dataset to test for population-specific genetic maps, and to re-estimate the genetic map distances with greater precision; standard errors for all intervals are provided. The map-interval sizes from the European (or European descent), Chinese, and Hispanic samples are in quite good agreement with each other. We found one map interval on chromosome 8p with a statistically significant size difference between the European and Chinese samples, and several map intervals with significant size differences between the African American and Chinese samples. When comparing Palauan with European samples, a statistically significant difference was detected at the telomeric region of chromosome 11p. Several significant differences were also identified between populations in chromosomal and genome lengths.Our new population-specific screening set maps can be used to improve the accuracy of disease-mapping studies. As a result of the large sample size, the average length of the 95% confidence interval (CI) for a 10 cM map interval is only 2.4 cM, which is considerably smaller than on previously published maps.Genetic maps are the foundation of linkage mapping for disease genes [1]. Accurate genetic maps can greatly increase the power of a linkage study, especially for multipoint analysis. The accuracy of genetic maps is largely a function of the number of actual recombination events present in the data. Despite the importance of precise genetic maps for linkage studies, most genome-wide genetic maps [2-7] were built using a small collection of pedigrees comprising only the eight largest families (188
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2350/12/15