Rare and low frequency variant stratification in the UK population: description and impact on association tests

Although variations in allele frequencies at common SNPs have been extensively studied in different populations, little is known about the stratification of rare variants and its impact on association tests. In this paper, we used Affymetrix 500K genotype data from the WTCCC to investigate if variants in three different frequency categories (below 1%, between 1 and 5%, above 5%) show different stratification patterns in the UK population. We found that these patterns are indeed different. The top principal component extracted from the rare variant category shows poor correlations with any principal component or combination of principal components from the low frequency or common variant categories. These results could suggest that a suitable solution to avoid false positive association due to population stratification would involve adjusting for the respective PCs when testing for variants in different allele frequency categories. However, we found this was not the case both on type 2 diabetes data and on simulated data. Indeed, adjusting rare variant association tests on PCs derived from rare variants does no better to correct for population stratification than adjusting on PCs derived from more common variants. Mixed models perform slightly better for low frequency variants than PC based adjustments but less well for the rarest variants. These results call for the need of new methodological developments specifically devoted to address rare variant stratification issues in association tests.