Whole genome identity-by-descent determination

Abstract

High-throughput single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping assays conveniently produce genotype data for genome-wide genetic linkage and association studies. For pedigree datasets, the unphased genotype data is used to infer the haplotypes for individuals, according to Mendelian inheritance rules. Linkage studies can then locate putative chromosomal regions based on the haplotype allele sharing among the pedigree members and their disease status. Most existing haplotyping programs require rather strict pedigree structures and return a single inferred solution for downstream analysis. In this research, we relax the pedigree structure to contain ungenotyped founders and present a cubic time whole genome haplotyping algorithm to minimize the number of zero-recombination haplotype blocks. With or without explicitly enumerating all the haplotyping solutions, the algorithm determines all distinct haplotype allele identity-by-descent (IBD) sharings among the pedigree members, in linear time in the total number of haplotyping solutions. Our algorithm is implemented as a computer program iBDD. Extensive simulation experiments using 2 sets of 16 pedigree structures from previous studies showed that, in general, there are trillions of haplotyping solutions, but only up to a few thousand distinct haplotype allele IBD sharings. iBDD is able to return all these sharings for downstream genome-wide linkage and association studies.