Access

Letter

Nature Genetics 38, 556–560 (1 May 2006) | doi:10.1038/ng1770

Magnitude and distribution of linkage disequilibrium in population isolates and implications for genome-wide association studies

Susan Service , Joseph DeYoung , Maria Karayiorgou , J Louw Roos , Herman Pretorious , Gabriel Bedoya , Jorge Ospina , Andres Ruiz-Linares , Ant|[oacute]|nio Macedo , Joana Almeida Palha , Peter Heutink , Yurii Aulchenko , Ben Oostra , Cornelia van Duijn , Marjo-Riitta Jarvelin , Teppo Varilo , Lynette Peddle , Proton Rahman , Giovanna Piras , Maria Monne , Sarah Murray , Luana Galver , Leena Peltonen , Chiara Sabatti , Andrew Collins & Nelson Freimer

The genome-wide distribution of linkage disequilibrium (LD) determines the strategy for selecting markers for association studies, but it varies between populations. We assayed LD in large samples (200 individuals) from each of 11 well-described population isolates and an outbred European-derived sample, using SNP markers spaced across chromosome 22.