Local exome sequences facilitate imputation of less common variants and increase power of genome wide association studies.

Joshi, Peter K; Prendergast, James; Fraser, Ross M; Huffman, Jennifer E; Vitart, Veronique; Hayward, Caroline; McQuillan, Ruth; Glodzik, Dominik et al. · PLoS One · 2013

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Abstract

The analysis of less common variants in genome-wide association studies promises to elucidate complex trait genetics but is hampered by low power to reliably detect association. We show that addition of population-specific exome sequence data to global reference data allows more accurate imputation, particularly of less common SNPs (minor allele frequency 1-10%) in two very different European populations. The imputation improvement corresponds to an increase in effective sample size of 28-38%, for SNPs with a minor allele frequency in the range 1-3%.

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