Tuesday, March 27, 2007
4:15 pm
B17 Upson Hall

Computer Science
Colloquium
Spring 2007

Eran Halperin
UC Berkeley
 

Whole-Genome Disease Association Studies: Challenges and Solutions


The recent data release of the Haplotype Mapping (HapMap) project, and the rapid reduction in genotyping costs, open new directions and opportunities in the study of complex diseases via the analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) data. At the same time, the increased size of the SNP datasets set new computational and statistical challenges.

In this talk I will discuss some of the computational challenges set by these large-scale studies, and the current solutions to these challenges. In particular, I will describe recent results on whole-genome haplotype analysis, including haplotype inference, and the incorporation of the HapMap data in haplotype analysis of case-control studies. I will also discuss potential drawbacks of these methods due to population substructure, and suggest solutions that are scalable to the coming large-scale studies.