A host of data on genetic variation from the Human Genome and International HapMap projects, and advances in high-throughput genotyping technologies, have made genome-wide association (GWA) studies technically feasible. GWA studies help in the discovery and quantification of the genetic components of disease risks, many of which have not been unveiled before, and have opened a new avenue to und...

Elucidating the genetic basis of complex traits and diseases in non-European populations is particularly challenging because US minority populations have been under-represented in genetic association studies. We developed an empirical Bayes approach named XPEB (cross-population empirical Bayes), designed to improve the power for mapping complex-trait-associated loci in a minority population by ...

Before the genomics technology revolution allowed us to do genome-wide science, genetics research relied on our limited knowledge about a subject to generate hypothesis and candidate genes to study. Despite the level of naiveté, several associations with susceptibility to a complex disease such as multiple sclerosis (MS) were discovered. Of these, HLA-DRB1 and IL7R (1) stand out as being confir...

With the advent of modern genomic methods to adjust for population stratification, the use of external or publicly available controls has become an attractive option for reducing the cost of large-scale case-control genetic association studies. In this article, we study the estimation of joint effects of genetic and environmental exposures from a case-control study where data on genome-wide mar...

Many common human diseases and complex traits are highly heritable and influenced by multiple genetic and environmental factors. Although genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have successfully identified many disease-associated variants, these genetic variants explain only a small proportion of the heritability of most complex diseases. Genetic interactions (gene-gene and gene-environment) su...