Genomic imprinting and linkage test for quantitative-trait Loci in extended pedigrees

Genomic imprinting is a mechanism in which only one of the two copies of a gene is expressed. Some genes that affect development and behavior in mammals are known to be imprinted. Deregulation of imprinted genes has been found in a number of human diseases. Incorporating imprinting information into linkage analysis results in a more powerful test for linkage. Here, we propose an efficient method to test for linkage and imprinting of quantitative traits in extended pedigrees. We compared the results obtained by using the extended-pedigree-analysis approach proposed in this study with other existing approaches. We found that the proposed method is more powerful and uses extended-pedigree information most efficiently.