An evaluation of the performance of HapMap SNP data in a Shanghai Chinese population: Analyses of allele frequency, linkage disequilibrium pattern and tagging SNPs transferability on chromosome 1q21-q25

BACKGROUND: The HapMap project aimed to catalog millions of common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the human genome in four major populations, in order to facilitate association studies of complex diseases. To examine the transferability of Han Chinese in Beijing HapMap data to the Southern Han Chinese in Shanghai, we performed comparative analyses between genotypes from over 4,500 SNPs in a 21 Mb region on chromosome 1q21-q25 in 80 unrelated Shanghai Chinese and 45 HapMap Chinese data. RESULTS: Three thousand and forty-two SNPs were analyzed after removal of SNPs that failed quality control and those not in the HapMap panel. We compared the allele frequency distributions, linkage disequilibrium patterns, haplotype frequency distributions and tagging SNP sets transferability between the HapMap population and Shanghai Chinese population. Among the four HapMap populations, Beijing Chinese showed the best correlation with Shanghai population on allele frequencies, linkage disequilibrium and haplotype frequencies. Tagging SNP sets selected from four HapMap populations at different thresholds were evaluated in the Shanghai sample. Under the threshold of r(2 )equal to 0.8 or 0.5, both HapMap Chinese and Japanese data showed better coverage and tagging efficiency than Caucasian and African data. CONCLUSION: Our study supported the applicability of HapMap Beijing Chinese SNP data to the study of complex diseases among southern Chinese population.