CONTEXT Cortical thickness is a highly heritable structural brain measurement, and reduced thickness has been associated with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and decreased cognitive performance among healthy control individuals. Identifying genes that contribute to variation in cortical thickness provides a means to elucidate some of the biological mechanisms underlying these diseases and gene...

The male-to-female sex ratio at birth is constant across world populations with an average of 1.06 (106 male to 100 female live births) for populations of European descent. The sex ratio is considered to be affected by numerous biological and environmental factors and to have a heritable component. The aim of this study was to investigate the presence of common allele modest effects at autosoma...

It is a commonly held belief that most complex diseases (e.g., diabetes, asthma, cancer) are affected in part by interactions between genes and environmental factors. However, investigators conducting genome-wide association studies typically test for only the marginal effects of each genetic marker on disease. In this paper, the authors propose an efficient and easily implemented 2-step analys...

The results of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and case-control studies performed to investigate the associations between epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene polymorphisms and glioma risk are controversial. The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to determine whether EGFR gene polymorphisms are associated with glioma risk by searching 'PubMed', 'EMBASE', 'Web of S...

Endometrial cancer is the most common gynecological malignancy in the developed world. Although there is evidence of genetic predisposition to the disease, most of the genetic risk remains unexplained. We present the meta-analysis results of four genome-wide association studies (4907 cases and 11 945 controls total) in women of European ancestry. We describe one new locus reaching genome-wide s...

Approaches based on linear mixed models (LMMs) have recently gained popularity for modelling population substructure and relatedness in genome-wide association studies. In the last few years, a bewildering variety of different LMM methods/software packages have been developed, but it is not always clear how (or indeed whether) any newly-proposed method differs from previously-proposed implement...

To increase plumage color uniformity and understand the genetic background of Korean chickens, we performed a genome-wide association study of different plumage color in Korean native chickens. We analyzed 60K SNP chips on 279 chickens with GEMMA methods for GWAS and estimated the genetic heritability for plumage color. The estimated heritability suggests that plumage coloration is a polygenic ...

Statistical genetics is a scientific discipline that covers any statistical analysis of genetic data. The interplay between statistics and genetics has a long history, dating back to the seminal work by Fisher almost a century ago to confirm the genetic theory of chromosomal inheritance (Piegorsch, 1990). Recent advancements in genotyping (i.e., collecting genetic data) technologies have produc...

There is growing evidence that much more of the genome than previously thought is required to explain the heritability of complex phenotypes. Recent studies have demonstrated that numerous common variants from across the genome explain portions of genetic variability, spawning various avenues of research directed at explaining the remaining heritability. This polygenic structure is also the mot...