Fred Boehm
Genome-wide association studies hold great promise in the identification of genetic variants that underlie individuals’ susceptibilities to many complex diseases, including diabetes, coronary heart disease, and lung cancer. However, population structure – systematic differences in allele frequencies among people with different ancestries – has the potential to confound findings in case-control genome-wide association studies. I will discuss current approaches to identification of population structure using genome-wide SNP data and strategies to account for population structure when performing association tests. I will illustrate these ideas with examples from the International HapMap Project.
