The similarity of the marker allele frequency and linkage disequilibrium structure between two populations are major factors for the determination of the transferability and efficiency of haplotype tagging SNP derived from one population to use for an indirect association study in another population. To prove the similarity between northern East Asian populations in Hapmap and Thais, 861 SNP in 166 drug-related genes shared between Thais, Han Chinese and Japanese were analyzed for their correlation statistics. Allele frequency, Fst statistics and linkage disequilibrium statistics (r 2 ) showed a high correlation between these populations. TagSNP sets derived by an aggressive tagging algorithm from these 861 SNP in Japanese and Chinese were used to test the coverage of East Asia-derived tagSNP in Thais. TagSNP derived from Japanese and Chinese are comparable in the percentage of coverage of the alleles captured with tagSNP at r 2 ‡0.8 (93% vs. 93%) in these drug-related gene loci. Additional tagSNP sets derived from the combination of Japanese-and Chinese-derived tagging SNP sets were used to test the coverage in Thais. The

In the candidate gene approach, information about the distribution of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) is a crucial requirement for choosing efficient markers necessary for a case-control association study. To obtain such information, we discovered SNPs in 13 genes related to atherosclerosis by resequencing exon-flanking regions of 32 healthy Thai individuals. In total, 194 polymorphisms were identified, 184 of them SNPs, four insertions, and the rest deletions. Fifty-nine of the SNPs were characterized as novel polymorphisms, and these accounted for 30% of the identified SNPs. Comparing allele frequency distributions of the Thai population with other Asian populations shows similar patterns. In contrast, a low correlation pattern (r = 0.521) was found when comparing with either Caucasian or African populations. However, some rare alleles (rs11574541 and rs10874913) are found in the Thai population but not in other Asian populations. Most of the novel SNPs found were located outside the haplotype blocks generated by known SNPs in the Thai population. Only 5.77% of the novel SNPs lies in these defined haplotype blocks. The selection of haplotype-tagging SNPs shows that 8 of 13 genes benefited from the ethnicspecific genotype information. That is, when at least one novel SNP was present, the tagging SNPs chosen were altered. Functional prediction of 16 nonsynonymous SNPs (nsSNPs) by three different algorithm tools demonstrated that five nsSNPs possibly alter their corresponding protein functions. These results provide necessary information for conducting further genetic association studies involving the Thai population and demonstrate that resequencing of candidate genes provides more complete information for full genetic studies.