Developing new statistical approaches for finely spaced markers arising in the context of genome wide association studies

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Recently large volumes of genetic data have become available. It is possible to use these data to look for genetic differences between people with a certain disease and people without the disease. The aim of doing this is to find the genetic location of the potential cause of the disease. One way of doing this is to consider small segments of DNA called haplotypes and to construct plausible histories of how each haplotype in a sample arose from a common ancestor through evolutionary events. Our work could lead to an improved methodology for disease mapping in order to inform potential therapies.We also want to investigate genetic abnormalities which have an effect on human foetal development and the probability that a foetus will survive until it is born and we hope to identify previously unsuspected genes involved in this.Humans can have different numbers of copies of the same section of DNA. We want to investigate this phenomenon and write software to find instances of this. We also want to write software to assess whether having specific numbers of copies of such sections influences whether or not people are likely to have a particular disease.