Haplotype Sharing Transmission/Disequilibrium Test for Tightly Linked Markers

Abstract

The Transmission/Disequilibrium Test (TDT) and the allied tests have become popular tools for detecting genetic linkage and association between a marker and a susceptibility locus. It is robust to population stratification and it might be more powerful than the conventional linkage analysis under some conditions. With the progress the Human Genome Project, many genetic markers can now be identified and genotyped within a very short physical distance, and the study of multi-marker haplotypes will likely yield more genetic information than the study of a single marker. We will discuss a Haplotype-sharing TDT (HSTDT) method to analyze multiple tightly linked markers. The performance of HSTDT is compared to some other existing methods. Some modifications of HSTDT that will allow for genotyping errors are also proposed.