Detection of tandem duplications and implications for linkage analysis

The first demonstration of an autosomal dominant human disease caused by segmental trisomy came in 1991 for Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease type 1A (CMT1A). For this disorder, the segmental trisomy is due to a large tandem duplication of 1.5 Mb of DNA located on chromosome 17p11.2-p12. The search for the CMT1A disease gene was misdirected and impeded because some chromosome 17 genetic markers that are linked to CMT1A lie within this duplication. To better understand how such a duplication might affect genetic analyses in the context of disease gene mapping, we studied the effects of marker duplication on transmission probabilities of marker alleles, on linkage analysis of an autosomal dominant disease, and on tests of linkage homogeneity. We demonstrate that the undetected presence of a duplication distorts transmission ratios, hampers fine localization of the disease gene, and increases false evidence of linkage heterogeneity. In addition, we devised a likelihood-based method for detecting the presence of a tandemly duplicated marker when one is suspected. We tested our methods through computer simulations and on CMT1A pedigrees genotyped at several chromosome 17 markers. On the simulated data, our method detected 96% of duplicated markers (with a false-positive rate of 5%). On the CMT1A data our method successfully identified two of three loci that are duplicated (with no false positives). This method could be used to identify duplicated markers in other regions of the genome and could be used to delineate the extent of duplications similar to that involved in CMT1A.