Estimates of relatedness have several applications such as the identification of relatives or in identifying disease related genes through identity by descent (IBD) mapping. Here we present a new method for identifying IBD tracts among individuals from genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms data. We use a continuous time Markov model where the hidden states are the number of alleles shared IBD between pairs of individuals at a given position. In contrast to previous methods, our method accurately accounts for linkage disequilibrium using pairwise haplotype probabilities. The method provides a map of the local relatedness along the genome. We illustrate the potential of the method for mapping disease genes on a real data set, and show that the method has the potential to map causative disease mutations using only a handful of affected individuals. The new IBD mapping method provides considerable improvement in mapping power in natural populations compared to standard association mapping methods.

The BRCA1 mutation c.5266dupC was originally described as a founder mutation in the Ashkenazi Jewish (AJ) population. However, this mutation is also present at appreciable frequency in several European countries, which raises intriguing questions about the origins of the mutation. We genotyped 245 carrier families from 14 different population groups (Russian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Greek, Brazilian and AJ) for seven microsatellite markers and confirmed that all mutation carriers share a common haplotype from a single founder individual. Using a maximum likelihood method that allows for both recombination and mutational events of marker loci, we estimated that the mutation arose some 1800 years ago in either Scandinavia or what is now northern Russia and subsequently spread to the various populations we genotyped during the following centuries, including the AJ population. Age estimates and the molecular evolution profile of the most common linked haplotype in the carrier populations studied further suggest that c.5266dupC likely entered the AJ gene pool in Poland approximately 400-500 years ago. Our results illustrate that (1) BRCA1 c.5266dupC originated from a single common ancestor and was a common European mutation long before becoming an AJ founder mutation and (2) the mutation is likely present in many additional European countries where genetic screening of BRCA1 may not yet be common practice.

All individuals in a finite population are related if traced back long enough and will, therefore, share regions of their genomes identical by descent (IBD). Detection of such regions has several important applications-from answering questions about human evolution to locating regions in the human genome containing disease-causing variants. However, IBD regions can be difficult to detect, especially in the common case where no pedigree information is available. In particular, all existing non-pedigree based methods can only infer IBD sharing between two individuals. Here, we present a new Markov Chain Monte Carlo method for detection of IBD regions, which does not rely on any pedigree information. It is based on a probabilistic model applicable to unphased SNP data. It can take inbreeding, allele frequencies, genotyping errors, and genomic distances into account. And most importantly, it can simultaneously infer IBD sharing among multiple individuals. Through simulations, we show that the simultaneous modeling of multiple individuals makes the method more powerful and accurate than several other non-pedigree based methods. We illustrate the potential of the method by applying it to data from individuals with breast and/or ovarian cancer, and show that a known disease-causing mutation can be mapped to a 2.2-Mb region using SNP data from only five seemingly unrelated affected individuals. This would not be possible using classical linkage mapping or association mapping.[Supplemental material is available for this article. The MCMC software is freely available at http://people.binf.ku.dk/ida/ Software/MCMC_IBDfinder/.] Identity by descent (IBD) is a fundamental concept in genetics. Two or more individuals share a region of their genomes IBD if they have identical nucleotide sequences in this region due to common ancestry. The concept of IBD has existed for a long time. It was introduced in the 1940s (Malecot 1946(Malecot , 1948 and has since then received attention within a number of fields of genetic research, ranging from forensic genetics (Evett and Weir 1998) to molecular ecology (Thompson 1975;Queller and Goodnight 1989;Ritland 1996;Lynch and Ritland 1999). But, most importantly, during the last several decades it has played an essential role within the field of human disease mapping. Until the beginning of this century, the main focus within this field was the development of methods for analyzing data from families with known pedigrees (Elston and Stewart 1971;Ott 1974;Cannings et al. 1978;Lander and Green 1987;Kruglyak et al. 1996;Abecasis et al. 2002). However, the concept of IBD has recently received renewed attention in the context of genomic data without any external pedigree information (Purcell et al. 2007;Browning 2008;Thompson 2008;Albrechtsen et al. 2009Albrechtsen et al. , 2010Gusev et al. 2009;Browning and Browning 2010).There are a number of different definitions of IBD in different contexts. In most human single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data, each SNP is caused by a single mutation. Therefo...

Background Schizophrenia is associated with lower pre-morbid intelligence (IQ) in addition to (pre-morbid) cognitive decline. Both schizophrenia and IQ are highly heritable traits. Therefore, we hypothesized that genetic variants associated with schizophrenia, including copy number variants (CNVs) and a polygenic schizophrenia (risk) score (PSS), may influence intelligence. Method IQ was estimated with the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). CNVs were determined from single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data using the QuantiSNP and PennCNV algorithms. For the PSS, odds ratios for genome-wide SNP data were calculated in a sample collected by the Psychiatric Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) Consortium (8690 schizophrenia patients and 11 831 controls). These were used to calculate individual PSSs in our independent sample of 350 schizophrenia patients and 322 healthy controls. Results Although significantly more genes were disrupted by deletions in schizophrenia patients compared to controls (p=0.009), there was no effect of CNV measures on IQ. The PSS was associated with disease status (R2=0.055, p=2.1×10−7) and with IQ in the entire sample (R2=0.018, p=0.0008) but the effect on IQ disappeared after correction for disease status. Conclusions Our data suggest that rare and common schizophrenia-associated variants do not explain the variation in IQ in healthy subjects or in schizophrenia patients. Thus, reductions in IQ in schizophrenia patients may be secondary to other processes related to schizophrenia risk.

Suicidal behavior and substance abuse are frequent phenomena among patients with schizophrenia and may be attributable in part to antipsychotic treatment failure. Individuals who carry functional variants of the CYP2D6 and CYP2C19 genes, shown to cause altered drug metabolism of psychoactive drugs, are at risk of toxic accumulation or rapid elimination of these drugs, leading to treatment failure. We tested whether substance abuse disorder and suicidal behavior were associated with the CYP2D6 and CYP2C19 genotypes among patients with schizophrenia. Three hundred sixty-two patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision) were genotyped for functional CYP2D6 and CYP2C19 polymorphisms. Based on available medical records and clinical interviews, their suicidal behavior and substance abuse disorder were evaluated. No significant associations between the CYP2D6 and CYP2C19 genotypes and suicidal behavior or substance abuse disorder were noted, and we conclude that cytochrome P450 genotyping in its present form is clinically irrelevant with respect to these phenomena.