This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Supplemental Research Data All Versions of this Article: gr.3761405v1 15/7/960    most recent Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Mitchell, A. A. Articles by Cutler, D. J. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Mitchell, A. A. Articles by Cutler, D. J. Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Methods

On the probability that a novel variant is a disease-causing mutation

¹ McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA

When a novel variant is found in a patient and not in a group of controls, it becomes a candidate for the disease-causing mutation in that patient. At present, no sampling theory exists for assessing the probability that the novel SNP might actually be a neutral variant. We have developed a population genetics-based method for calculating a P-value for a mutation-detection effort. Our method can be applied to a heterozygous patient, a homozygous patient, with or without inbreeding, or to a patient who is a compound heterozygote. Additionally, the method can be used to calculate the probability of finding a neutral variant at frequencies that differ between a group of patients and a group of controls, given some length of sequence examined. This method accounts for the multiple testing that is inherent in identification of variants through sequencing, to be used in subsequent case-control analyses. We show, for example, that for complete resequencing of 10 kb, the probability of finding a neutral variant in a patient and not in 50 controls is about 15%. Thus, discovery of a variant in a patient and not in a group of controls is, on its own, very weak evidence of involvement with disease.

² Present address: Departments of Statistics and Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA.

³ Corresponding author.
E-mail dcutler{at}jhmi.edu; fax (410) 502-7544.

[Supplemental material is available online at www.genome.org.]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				N. von Ahsen Two for Typing: Homogeneous Combined Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism Scanning and Genotyping Clin. Chem., October 1, 2005; 51(10): 1761 - 1762. [Full Text] [PDF]