This paper presents an efficient program for checking Mendelian consistency in a pedigree. Since pedigrees may contain incomplete and/or erroneous information, geneticists need to pre-process them before performing linkage analysis. Removing superfluous genotypes that do not respect the Mendelian inheritance laws can speed up the linkage analysis. We have described in a formal way the Mendelian...

Epigenetic alterations of the genome such as DNA promoter methylation and chromatin remodeling play an important role in tumorigenesis. These modifications take place throughout development with subsequent events occurring later in adulthood. Recent studies, however, suggest that some epigenetic alterations that influence cancer risk are inherited through the germline from parent to child and a...

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Single gene disorders with Mendelian inheritance patterns have contributed greatly to the identification of genes and pathways implicated in genetic disease. In these cases, molecular analysis predicts disease status relatively directly. However, there are many abnormalities which show familial recurrence and have a clear genetic component, but do not show regular Mendelian segregation patterns...

Introduction: Instrumental variable (IV) methods have been used in econometrics for several decades now, but have only recently been introduced into the epidemiologic research frameworks. Similarly, Mendelian randomization studies, which use the IV methodology for analysis and inference in epidemiology, were introduced into the epidemiologist's toolbox only in the last decade. Analysis: Mendeli...

Parkinson's disease (PD) can be divided into familial (Mendelian) and sporadic forms. A number of causal genes have been discovered for the Mendelian form, which constitutes 10-20% of the total cases. Genome-wide association studies have successfully uncovered a number of susceptibility loci for sporadic cases but those only explain a small fraction (6-7%) of PD heritability. It has been observ...

In this article, the quantitative genetic aspects of imprinted genes and statistical properties of methods to detect imprinted QTL are studied. Different models to detect imprinted QTL and to distinguish between imprinted and Mendelian QTL were compared in a simulation study. Mendelian and imprinted QTL were simulated in an F2 design and analyzed under Mendelian and imprinting models. Mode of e...

Do genes presenting variation that has been linked to human disease have different biological properties than genes that have never been related to disease? What is the relationship between disease and fitness? Are the evolutionary pressures that affect genes linked to Mendelian diseases the same to those acting on genes whose variation contributes to complex disorders? The answers to these que...