FastTagger: an efficient algorithm for genome-wide tag SNP selection using multi-marker linkage disequilibrium

Background: Human genome contains millions of common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and these SNPs play an important role in understanding the association between genetic variations and human diseases. Many SNPs show correlated genotypes, or linkage disequilibrium (LD), thus it is not necessary to genotype all SNPs for association study. Many algorithms have been developed to find a small subset of SNPs called tag SNPs that are sufficient to infer all the other SNPs. Algorithms based on the r2 LD statistic have gained popularity because r2 is directly related to statistical power to detect disease associations. Most of existing r2 based algorithms use pairwise LD. Recent studies show that multi-marker LD can help further reduce the number of tag SNPs. However, existing tag SNP selection algorithms based on multi-marker LD are both time-consuming and memoryconsuming. They cannot work on chromosomes containing more than 100 k SNPs using length-3 tagging rules. Results: We propos...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Guimei Liu, Yue Wang, Limsoon Wong
• Keywords: Algorithms, BMCBI 2010, SNPs, Tag Snps