Advances in statistical human genetics over the last 25 years.

The past 25 years has seen an explosion in the number of genetic markers that can be measured on DNA samples at an ever decreasing cost. Although basic statistical methods for analysing such data gathered on samples of either independent individuals or family members, one or two markers at a time, were already well developed before this explosion occurred, there has been a corresponding burst in activity to develop multiple marker models to find disease-causing gene variants, capitalizing on the data that have become available, to increase the power of such methods. This has required the concomitant development of faster algorithms to speed up the computation of various likelihoods.

Estimating the recombination frequency for the PTC-Kell linkage.

Two data sets are analyzed for linkage between the PTC and Kell blood group loci. The original report of close linkage for these loci was that of Conneally et al. (1976), where the maximum likelihood estimate of theta was 0.