Allelic association patterns for a dense SNP map

A dense set of 5,000 SNPs on a 10-Mb region of human chromosome 20 has been typed on samples of African Americans, East Asians, and United Kingdom Caucasians. There are departures from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium beyond the level at which markers are often discarded because of possible genotyping errors. The observation that markers showing such departures are often close together on the chromosome confirms the result that Hardy-Weinberg tests at two loci are correlated to an extent that depends on the linkage disequilibrium between those two markers. Linkage disequilibrium can be described by the composite linkage disequilibrium coefficient, the parameter that determines the behavior of case-control allelic tests of association. A useful preliminary investigation of datasets of this type is provided by counting the numbers of distinct multi-locus genotypes in windows of a few markers.