A method for identifying haplotypes carrying the causative allele in positive natural selection and genome-wide association studies

Abstract

Methods for detecting positive selection relied on finding evidence of long haplotypes to identify candidate regions under selection. However, these methods generally do not identify the length and form of the selected haplotype. We present HapFinder, a method which can find the common longest haplotype under three different settings from a database, which is relevant in the analysis of positive selection in population genetics and also in medical genetics for finding the likely haplotype form carrying the causal allele at the functional polymorphism. A java program, implementing the methods described in HapFinder, together with R scripts and datasets for producing the figures presented in this article are publicly available at http://www.nus-cme.org.sg/sgvp/software/hapfinder.html. The site also hosts an online browser for finding haplotypes from the International HapMap Project and the Singapore Genome Variation Project.