Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology
Volume 2010 (2010), Article ID 369534, 13 pages
doi:10.1155/2010/369534
Research Article

Detection of Fetomaternal Genotype Associations in Early-Onset Disorders: Evaluation of Different Methods and Their Application to Childhood Leukemia

Jasmine Healy,1 Mathieu Bourgey,1 Chantal Richer,1 Daniel Sinnett,1,2 and Marie-Helene Roy-Gagnon1,3

1Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Center, University of Montreal, 3175 Chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine, Room B-467, Montreal, QC, H3T 1C5, Canada
2Department of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Montreal, 3175 Chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine, Room 7955, Montreal, QC, H3T 1C5, Canada
3Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Montreal, P. O. Box 6128, Station Centre-Ville, Montreal, QC, H3C 3J7, Canada

Received 31 August 2009; Revised 11 November 2009; Accepted 15 March 2010

Academic Editor: Wenjiang J. Fu

Copyright © 2010 Jasmine Healy et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Supplementary Material

Simulation studies were performed in which the performance of three fetomaternal association testing methods was assessed under varying levels of mating asymmetry (MA), measured in terms of the degree of departure from the expected mate-pair probability under symmetry. This Supplementary Material shows how this departure from symmetry influences genotype frequency differences between mating pairs (Supplementary Figure 1) and how it influences the type I error rates of the fetomaternal association testing procedures (Supplementary Figure 2). Guided by our simulation studies, we also performed a fetomaternal association study of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) where 29 SNPs in 12 cell-cycle genes were tested for putative maternallymediated effects; Supplementary Table 1 shows the complete child and mother genotype association test results.

  1. Supplementary Figure 1
  2. Supplementary Figure 2
  3. Supplementary Table 1