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A worldwide survey of haplotype variation and linkage disequilibrium in the human genome

Nature Genetics volume 38, pages 1251–1260 (2006)Cite this article

Abstract

Recent genomic surveys have produced high-resolution haplotype information, but only in a small number of human populations. We report haplotype structure across 12 Mb of DNA sequence in 927 individuals representing 52 populations. The geographic distribution of haplotypes reflects human history, with a loss of haplotype diversity as distance increases from Africa. Although the extent of linkage disequilibrium (LD) varies markedly across populations, considerable sharing of haplotype structure exists, and inferred recombination hotspot locations generally match across groups. The four samples in the International HapMap Project contain the majority of common haplotypes found in most populations: averaging across populations, 83% of common 20-kb haplotypes in a population are also common in the most similar HapMap sample. Consequently, although the portability of tag SNPs based on the HapMap is reduced in low-LD Africans, the HapMap will be helpful for the design of genome-wide association mapping studies in nearly all human populations.

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Figure 1: Haplotype structure in diverse populations for two genomic regions of size ∼330 kb.
Figure 2: Schematic world map of haplotype diversity.
Figure 3: Effect of ascertainment bias on haplotype diversity.
Figure 4: Population recombination rates (ρ) across genomic regions.
Figure 5
Figure 6: The fraction of common haplotypes in individual populations that are also common in the HapMap.
Figure 7: Portability of tag SNPs chosen using the HapMap.
Figure 8: The determinants of portability of HapMap tag SNPs.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. DeYoung and the Southern California Genotyping Consortium for genotyping, P. Scheet for providing prepublication access to fastPHASE, C. Shtir for assistance and M. Przeworski for comments. This work was supported by grants from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund (J.K.P., N.A.R.), the Sloan Foundation (J.D.W., J.K.P., N.A.R.), the Packard Foundation (J.K.P.) and the US National Science Foundation (J.D.W., N.A.R.).

Author information

Author notes

  1. Donald F Conrad, Mattias Jakobsson and Graham Coop: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Genetics, University of Chicago, 920 East 58th Street, Chicago, 60637, Illinois, USA

    Donald F Conrad, Graham Coop, Xiaoquan Wen & Jonathan K Pritchard

  2. Department of Human Genetics, University of Michigan, 100 Washtenaw Avenue, Ann Arbor, 48109, Michigan, USA

    Mattias Jakobsson & Noah A Rosenberg

  3. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California, 1050 Childs Way, Los Angeles, 90089, California, USA

    Jeffrey D Wall

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Contributions

J.D.W., N.A.R., and J.K.P. conceived and jointly supervised the study, D.F.C. performed the SNP design, N.A.R. and J.K.P. cleaned the data, and J.K.P. performed the phasing. All authors analyzed the data, with the following primary contributions: haplotype visualization, X.W.; haplotype diversity statistics and haplotype sharing with the HapMap, M.J.; recombination rate estimation, G.C.; tag SNP portability, D.F.C.; determinants of portability, M.J. and D.F.C. The supplementary information was written by D.F.C, G.C., M.J., N.A.R. and J.K.P., and the paper was written primarily by J.K.P. and N.A.R., with assistance from all other authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Noah A Rosenberg.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Fig. 1

Portability of tag-SNPs from seven different panels. (PDF 172 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 2

Difference in PVT between Patil and non-Patil regions (CEU tags). (PDF 32 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 3

Difference in PVT between Patil and non-Patil regions (YRI tags). (PDF 31 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 4

Relationships between tag portability and the distance at which the r2 measure of linkage disequilibrium decays below 0.5, and between tag portability and FST genetic distance to the HapMap population that produces the highest tag portability. (PDF 33 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 5

Relationships between tag portability and distance at which the r2 measure of linkage disequilibrium decays below 0.5, and tag portability and FST genetic distance to the HapMap population that produces the highest tag portability. (PDF 44 kb)

Supplementary Table 1

Details of SNPs used. (XLS 367 kb)

Supplementary Methods (PDF 434 kb)

Supplementary Note (PDF 1390 kb)

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Conrad, D., Jakobsson, M., Coop, G. et al. A worldwide survey of haplotype variation and linkage disequilibrium in the human genome. Nat Genet 38, 1251–1260 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1911

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