A sequence variation scan of the coagulation factor VIII (FVIII) structural gene and associations with plasma FVIII activity levels.

Plasma factor VIII coagulant activity (FVIII:C) level is a highly heritable quantitative trait that is strongly correlated with thrombosis risk. Polymorphisms within only 1 gene, the ABO blood-group locus, have been unequivocally demonstrated to contribute to the broad population variability observed for this trait. Because less than 2.

Heritability and linkage analysis of hand, foot, and eye preference in Mexican Americans.

Functional lateralities are of interest due to their relationship with cerebral lateralisation and language development. However, genes influencing sidedness remain elusive. We measured direction and consistency of hand, foot, and eye preference in 584 Mexican-Americans from families participating in the San Antonio Family Diabetes/Gallbladder Study.

Linkage disequilibrium across two different single-nucleotide polymorphism genome scans.

Linkage disequilibrium (LD) content was calculated for the Genetic Analysis Workshop 14 Affymetrix and Illumina single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genome scans of the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism samples. Pair-wise LD was measured as both D' and r2 on 505 pedigree founder individuals. The r2 estimates were then used to correct the multipoint identity by descent matrix (MIBD) calculation to account for LD and LOD scores on chromosomes 3 and 18 were calculated for COGA's ttdt3 electrophysiological trait using those MIBDs.

A comparison of discrete versus continuous environment in a variance components-based linkage analysis of the COGA data.

Background: The information content of a continuous variable exceeds that of its categorical counterpart. The parameterization of a model may diminish the benefit of using a continuous variable. We explored the use of continuous versus discrete environment in variance components based analyses examining gene x environment interaction in the electrophysiological phenotypes from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism.

Effect of genotype x alcoholism interaction on linkage analysis of an alcoholism-related quantitative phenotype.

Studies have shown that genetic and environmental factors and their interactions affect several alcoholism phenotypes. Genotype x alcoholism (GxA) interaction refers to the environmental (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) influences on the autosomal genes contributing to variation in an alcoholism-related quantitative phenotype. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of GxA interaction on the detection of linkage for alcoholism-related phenotypes.

A comparison of univariate, bivariate, and trivariate whole-genome linkage screens of genetically correlated electrophysiological endophenotypes.

We used a maximum-likelihood based multipoint linkage approach implemented in SOLAR to examine simultaneously linkage for three electrophysiological endophenotypes from the Collaborative Study of the Genetics of Alcoholism: TTTH1, TTTH2, and TTTH3. These endophenotypes have been identified as markers of alcohol dependence susceptibility. Data were from 905 individuals in 143 families.

Software for quantitative trait analysis.

This paper provides a brief overview of software currently available for the genetic analysis of quantitative traits in humans. Programs that implement variance components, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), Haseman-Elston (H-E) and penetrance model-based linkage analyses are discussed, as are programs for measured genotype association analyses and quantitative trait transmission disequilibrium tests. The software compared includes LINKAGE, FASTLINK, PAP, SOLAR, SEGPATH, ACT, Mx, MERLIN, GENEHUNTER, Loki, Mendel, SAGE, QTDT and FBAT.

Heritability of hemostasis phenotypes and their correlation with type 2 diabetes status in Mexican Americans.

Hypercoagulation often occurs in type 2 diabetes, suggesting pleiotropy of the genes that influence disease liability and hemostasis-related phenotypes. To better understand the relationship between hemostasis and diabetes, we first used maximum-likelihood methods to estimate the relative contribution of additive genetic, measured environmental, and shared household effects to the normal variance of 16 hemostasis-related traits in 813 individuals participating in the San Antonio Family Heart Study. We estimated moderate to high heritabilities (0.