PLoS ONE (Jan 2012)

Genome-wide association study heterogeneous cohort homogenization via subject weight knock-down.

  • André X C N Valente,
  • Joseph Zischkau,
  • Joo Heon Shin,
  • Yuan Gao,
  • Abhijit Sarkar

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048653
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 10
p. e48653

Abstract

Read online

Population structure can be a source of both false-positive and false-negative findings in a genome-wide association study. This article proposes an approach that helps to reduce the false-positives. It consists of homogenizing the diseased/healthy phenotype ratio across the cohort, by decreasing the statistical weight of selected individuals. After homogenization, the cohort is statistically handled as if originating from a single well-mixed population. The method was applied to homogenize a Parkinson's disease genome-wide association study cohort.