Genetic association studies have become an important part of our scientific landscape. This commentary discusses some basic scientific issues which should be considered when reporting and evaluating such studies including SNP Discovery, Genotyping and Haplotype Analysis; Population Size, Matching of Cases and Controls, and Population Stratification; Phenotype Definition and Multiple Related Phe...

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have evolved over the last ten years into a powerful tool for investigating the genetic architecture of human disease. In this work, we review the key concepts underlying GWAS, including the architecture of common diseases, the structure of common human genetic variation, technologies for capturing genetic information, study designs, and the statistical me...

Genome-Wide Association studies (GWAS) have brought a revolutionary change or paradigm shift in detecting novel variants for complex disorders and shifting the burden of finding the biological relevance of these newly discovered variants on biochemists and physiologists, hence it is a movement from forward to reverse genetics. Here we discuss the role of such studies with GWAS designs from anth...

Apart from the specific findings of this analysis, the authors encourage the use of what they call a nutrientwide association study, analogous to a genome-wide association study (GWAS), to investigate dietary determinants of health outcomes.1 Similar to the agnostic approach used in a GWAS, the features of their approach include the following: (1) the inclusion of all available nutrient exposur...

Apart from the specific findings of this analysis, the authors encourage the use of what they call a nutrientwide association study, analogous to a genome-wide association study (GWAS), to investigate dietary determinants of health outcomes.1 Similar to the agnostic approach used in a GWAS, the features of their approach include the following: (1) the inclusion of all available nutrient exposur...

Panicle size has a high correlation with grain yield in rice. There is a bottleneck to identify the additional quantitative trait loci (QTL) for panicle size due to the conventional traits used for QTL mapping. To identify more genetic loci for panicle size, a panicle developmental trait (LNTB, the length from panicle neck-knot to the first primary branch in the rachis) related to panicle size ...

Genome-wide association studies, in which as many as a million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) are measured on several thousand samples, are quickly becoming a common type of study for identifying genetic factors associated with many phenotypes. There is a strong assumption that interactions between SNPs or genes and interactions between genes and environmental factors substantially contr...

INTRODUCTION The state-of-the-art for dealing with multiple levels of relationship among the samples in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) is unified mixed model analysis (MMA). This approach is very flexible, can be applied to both family-based and population-based samples, and can be extended to incorporate other effects in a straightforward and rigorous fashion. Here, we present a comple...

To analyze multiple single-nucleotide polymorphisms simultaneously when the number of markers is much larger than the number of studied individuals, as is the situation we have in genome-wide association studies (GWAS), we developed the iterative Bayesian variable selection method and successfully applied it to the simulated rheumatoid arthritis data provided by the Genetic Analysis Workshop 15...

A genome-wide association study identified a common genetic variant rs4939827 at 18q21 in SMAD7 to be related with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk with OR=1.2 and P =7.80E-28. Until recently, several meta-analysis studies have been conducted, and reported significant association between rs4939827 and CRC risk. However none of these studies evaluated the potential association between rs4939827 and ...