The impact of correlated genetic markers on large-scale DNA-based gene-gene interaction studies

Abstract

Master thesis in Biostatistics - specialization in Bioinformatics. Title : The impact of correlated genetic merkers on large scale DNA-based gene-gene interaction studies. Author : Marc Joiret Supervisors : Prof. Ziv Shkedy, Prof. Kristel Van Steen. The performances of MB-MDR (model based multifactor dimensionality reduction) in detecting gene-gene interaction in genome wide association studies is poorly documented in the literature. In this work, we aimed at building different simulated datasets harboring known hidden pairs of epistatic genetic markers. The objective is to use these simulated datasets to measure the power of MB-MDR in different configurations of the embedded hidden pair of markers. Two main concerns in building the simulation datasets require to incorporate realistic human genome linkage disequilibrium patterns and to control population stratification because both confound gene-gene interaction effect on the phenotype (trait or disease).