Genome-wide approaches for identifying interacting susceptibility regions for asthma

A genome-wide correlation analysis and cluster analysis were utilized to de termine chromosomal regions that had similar nonparametric linkage scores a cross families in order to locate interacting susceptibility loci for asthm a. Conditional analysis was performed to detect any increase in lod score o ver baseline. Eight of the strongest 5% of the correlations in the German a nd CSGA asthma data sets occurred in both data sets. The strongest positive correlations found in both data sets were between the 200 cM region on chr omosome 2 with chromosome 12 at 90-120 cM (r = 0.26) and also with chromoso me 6 at 40-70 cM (r = 0.24). While the cluster analysis did not find any re gions that clustered across data sets, this method did detect clustering in regions that have been previously linked to asthma. ((C)) 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc.