An Evaluation of the Performance of Tag SNPs Derived from HapMap in a Caucasian Population

The Haplotype Map (HapMap) project recently generated genotype data for more than 1 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in four population samples. The main application of the data is in the selection of tag single-nucleotide polymorphisms (tSNPs) to use in association studies. The usefulness of this selection process needs to be verified in populations outside those used for the HapMap project. In addition, it is not known how well the data represent the general population, as only 90–120 chromosomes were used for each population and since the genotyped SNPs were selected so as to have high frequencies. In this study, we analyzed more than 1,000 individuals from Estonia. The population of this northern European country has been influenced by many different waves of migrations from Europe and Russia. We genotyped 1,536 randomly selected SNPs from two 500-kbp ENCODE regions on Chromosome 2. We observed that the tSNPs selected from the CEPH (Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humain) from Utah (CEU) HapMap samples (derived from US residents with northern and western European ancestry) captured most of the variation in the Estonia sample. (Between 90% and 95% of the SNPs with a minor allele frequency of more than 5% have an r2 of at least 0.8 with one of the CEU tSNPs.) Using the reverse approach, tags selected from the Estonia sample could almost equally well describe the CEU sample. Finally, we observed that the sample size, the allelic frequency, and the SNP density in the dataset used to select the tags each have important effects on the tagging performance. Overall, our study supports the use of HapMap data in other Caucasian populations, but the SNP density and the bias towards high-frequency SNPs have to be taken into account when designing association studies.Synopsis: The recent completion of the Haplotype Map (HapMap) project of the human genome provides considerable information on the patterns of variation in the genome of four populations. One of the applications is a description of a set of tags that act as proxies for many other surrounding variants. This will greatly help researchers in their quest to find complex disease genes by reducing the number of genetic variants to test in association studies. To evaluate its usefulness, several aspects of the map, including its transferability to other populations, still needed to be verified experimentally. Using genomic regions where variants had been thoroughly documented in Caucasian samples from Estonia, the researchers found that the transferability of tags is extremely good. The researchers also found that variants with low frequency in the general population (i.e., less than 5%) could not be accurately captured with tags, and that the regional density of variants in the HapMap project had a major impact on the performance of the tags. This research indicates that the HapMap project will be useful, but that careful consideration of hypotheses and study design will be essential for the success of association studies.