Statistical Modeling for Genome Wide Association Studies

Abstract

Genomics is the study of the whole genome of any living organism along with its environment and it incorporates different elements from genetics (a branch of biology that generally deals with the heredity). Genomics uses “DNA sequencing methods” to generate sequences of genomes using recombinant DNA, and it utilizes Bioinformatics to assemble the sequences of whole genomes and analyze the structure and function of genomes. It differs from 'classical genetics' in that it considers an organism’s full complement of hereditary material, rather than one gene or one gene product at a time. Moreover, genomics focuses on interactions between loci and allele within the genome and other interactions such as epistasis, pleiotropy and heterosis (Figure 1.1). The availability of complete DNA sequences for entire organisms is made easy by the Genomics. Genomics was made possible by both the pioneering work of Fred Sanger and the more recent next-generation sequencing technology. Fred Sanger's group established techniques of sequencing, genome mapping, data storage, and bioinformatics analyses in the 1970s and 1980s. This work paved the way for the human genome project in the 1990s (Bentley et al., 2008) an enormous feat of global collaboration that culminated in the publication of the complete human genome sequence in 2003. Nowadays, next-generation sequence technologies have led to remarkable improvements in the speed, capacity and affordability of genome sequencing. Moreover, advances in bioinformatics have enabled hundreds of life- science databases and projects that provide support for scientific research. Information stored and organized in these databases can easily be searched, compared and analyzed………….