Abstract:

Large-scale genotyping of SNPs has shown a great promise in identifying
markers that could be linked to diseases.
One of the major obstacles involved in performing these studies is that
the underlying population sub-structure could produce spurious associations.
Population sub-structure can be caused by the presence of two distinct
sub-populations or a single pool of admixed individuals. In this talk, I
will focus on the latter which is significantly harder to detect in practice.
New advances in this research direction are expected to play a key role in identifying loci which are different among different populations and are still associated with a disease. Furthermore, the detection of an individual ancestry has important medical implications. I will describe two methods that we have recently developed to detect admixture, or the locus-specific ancestry in an admixed population. We have run extensive experiments to characterize the important parameters that have to be optimized when considering this problem – I will describe the results of thes experiments in context with existing tools such as SABER and STRUCTURE.

Date: 2009-Jan-29     Time: 11:00:00     Room: 336

For more information:

• aml@inesc-id.pt