Poster: High-performance computing for mapping disease-related genes

Two wide-spread and powerful techniques in human genetic epidemiology are linkage and association analysis. Linkage analysis is used to identify the approximate location of disease-related genes on a map of the human genome, and generally uses pedigree data and large sets of genetic markers. Since the resolution of locality approximations determined using linkage analysis is quite low (spanning millions of base pairs), researchers usually perform additional analyses to improve the accuracy. Association analysis commonly uses large numbers of unrelated individuals or parent-child “trios” rather than pedigree data, but can also be performed based on pedigrees.