Analysis of Sib-Pair IBD Profiles and Genomic Context for Identification of the Relevant Molecular Signatures for Alcoholism

Recent advances in SNPs that allow genome-wide profiling of complex biological phenotypes have offered the golden opportunities to unravel the high-order mechanisms and have also motivated development of the corresponding analysis strategies. Here, we design four novel comprehensive association criteria concerning both informatics of IBD statistic and genomic context. Application of these criteria along with sliding window and permutation test to 100 simulated replicates for two American populations to extract the relevant SNPs for alcoholism from sib-pair IBD profiles of pedigrees demonstrates that the proposed new approaches have successfully identified most of the simulated true loci, thus implicating that IBD statistic and genomic context could be used as the informatics for mining the underlying genes for complex human diseases. Compared with the classical Haseman-Elston method, our strategy is more efficient and simpler.