An important challenge in medicine and human genetics is to locate disease affecting genes and gene variants, to be able to study a disease, screen for high-risk individuals, and ultimately to help prevent or cure the disease. In spite of intense research there are still many unsolved problems, both in understanding the underlying biology of common diseases, in the statistical modelling of diseases and in efficient computation methods for locating causative variants.

This project is concerned with development of computation methods and computer tools for locating disease genes. The amount of data and the complexity of the problems make computer tools essential for successful studies. With the recent improvements in genotyping technology that now allow simultaneous genotyping of hundreds of thousands of polymorphisms, the analysis of data is becoming the bottleneck of studies, and hence it is increasingly important to develop better and faster analysis methods.

The project is running February 2008 – January 2011 at Bioinformatics Research Center, University of Aarhus. It is a continuation of a project in the period February 2006 – January 2007 at the Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, (funded by FNU, grant 272-05-0283) and the period February 2007 – January 2008 at Bioinformatics Research Center, University of Aarhus (funded by FTP, grant 274-05-0365) and in turn of a continuation of an ISIS Katrinebjerg collaboration between Bioinformatics ApS and Bioinformatics Research Center (BiRC), University of Aarhus (March 2004 – February 2006).