HapMap scanning of novel human minor histocompatibility antigens.

Minor histocompatibility antigens (mHags) are molecular targets of allo-immunity associated with hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) and involved in graft-versus-host disease, but they also have beneficial antitumor activity. mHags are typically defined by host SNPs that are not shared by the donor and are immunologically recognized by cytotoxic T cells isolated from post-HSCT patients. However, the number of molecularly identified mHags is still too small to allow prospective studies of their clinical importance in transplantation medicine, mostly due to the lack of an efficient method for isolation.

Evaluation of genome-wide power of genetic association studies based on empirical data from the HapMap project.

With recent advances in high-throughput single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) typing technologies, genome-wide association studies have become a realistic approach to identify the causative genes that are responsible for common diseases of complex genetic traits. In this strategy, a trade-off between the increased genome coverage and a chance of finding SNPs incidentally showing a large statistics becomes serious due to extreme multiple-hypothesis testing. We investigated the extent to which this trade-off limits the genome-wide power with this approach by simulating a large number of case-control panels based on the empirical data from the HapMap Project.