Allele frequency estimation at loci with incomplete co-dominant expression

Abstract

Although allelic variants at a locus usually are expressed either dominantly or co-dominantly, there are many cases when a gene is dominantly expressed in some individuals and co-dominantly in others. We present a maximum-likelihood procedure for allele frequency estimation in such situations of "incomplete" co-dominant gene expression at an autosomal locus that segregates for two alleles. Our proposed estimator generally is less biased and has a smaller sampling variance than those previously described.