One Degree Of Freedom For Dominance In Indirect Association Studies

Usual tests of association using tag single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) assume that the alleles of the causal locus act additively and that these alleles are then predicted indirectly via a set of tag SNPs. In the presence of strong dominance effects this model is not correct and an extra term needs to be included, which uses the tag SNPs to predict the heterozygosity of the causal locus. Assuming this scenario of a strong dominance effect, we present an appropriate test statistic and investigate how much power, if any, we gain by adding this single degree of freedom for dominance.