Effectiveness of extreme discordant sib pairs to detect oligogenic disease loci

A method for the genomic screening of quantitative traits using extreme discordant sib pairs (EDSPs) has recently been described by Risch and Zhang [1995; 1996]. For many models relevant to common, genetically complex diseases, EDSPs are the most powerful siblings for detecting linkage. Thus, if such siblings can be identified and collected, powerful studies with reasonable genotyping budgets can be conducted. Using a subset of the GAW10 data, we have simulated a genomic screen using EDSPs. From the 4,780 total families in the first 20 replicates of 239 families, there were 100, 104, 155, 107, and 180 EDSP families for Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, and Q5, respectively. EDSP data were analyzed for each trait using a modified version of MAPMAKER/SIBS capable of handling extreme discordant sib pairs. Four regions, one for Q1, one for Q2, and two for Q4, were able to exceed a threshold for linkage corresponding to a 0.001 pointwise significance level. In three cases, maximum lod score (MLS) peaks occurred within 3.8 cM of a major gene. In the fourth case, the MLS peak occurred 28.4 cM from a major gene. Omission of parents and an alternative definition of EDSP were also investigated.