Microsatellites versus single-nucleotide polymorphisms in linkage analysis for quantitative and qualitative measures

摘要

BackgroundGenetic maps based on single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) are increasingly being used as an alternative to microsatellite maps. This study compares linkage results for both types of maps for a neurophysiology phenotype and for an alcohol dependence phenotype. Our analysis used two SNP maps on the Illumina and Affymetrix platforms. We also considered the effect of high linkage disequilibrium (LD) in regions near the linkage peaks by analysing a "sparse" SNP map obtained by dropping some markers in high LD with other markers in those regions.