Testing Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium on allelic data from VNTR loci

Abstract

Several methods for testing independence of pairs of alleles in a population that are obtained from a VNTR locus are presented. We assume an exchangeable quasi-continuous distribution of the fragment lengths used to measure the allelic pairs. Bivariate-estimated quantiles computed from the quantiles of the entire data set are then utilized for testing independence. These methods have the advantage of being minimally susceptible to the criticism of (a) the inability of a technology to measure a few small-sized or rather large-sized fragments and (b) inadequate estimation of the homozygotic proportion.