Designing Genome-Wide Association Studies: Sample Size, Power, Imputation, and the Choice of Genotyping Chip

Abstract

Genome-wide association studies are revolutionizing the search for the genes underlying human complex diseases. The main decisions to be made at the design stage of these studies are the choice of the commercial genotyping chip to be used and the numbers of case and control samples to be genotyped. The most common method of comparing different chips is using a measure of coverage, but this fails to properly account for the effects of sample size, the genetic model of the disease, and linkage disequilibrium between SNPs. In this paper, we argue that the statistical power to detect a causative variant should be the major criterion in study design. Because of the complicated pattern of linkage disequilibrium (LD) in the human genome, power cannot be calculated analytically and must instead be assessed by simulation. We describe in detail a method of simulating case-control samples at a set of linked SNPs that replicates the patterns of LD in human populations, and we used it to assess power for a comprehensive set of available genotyping chips. Our results allow us to compare the performance of the chips to detect variants with different effect sizes and allele frequencies, look at how power changes with sample size in different populations or when using multi-marker tags and genotype imputation approaches, and how performance compares to a hypothetical chip that contains every SNP in HapMap. A main conclusion of this study is that marked differences in genome coverage may not translate into appreciable differences in power and that, when taking budgetary considerations into account, the most powerful design may not always correspond to the chip with the highest coverage. We also show that genotype imputation can be used to boost the power of many chips up to the level obtained from a hypothetical “complete” chip containing all the SNPs in HapMap. Our results have been encapsulated into an R software package that allows users to design future association studies and our methods provide a framework with which new chip sets can be evaluated.

Author Summary

Genome-wide association studies are a powerful and now widely-used method for finding genetic variants that increase the risk of developing particular diseases. These studies are complex and must be planned carefully in order to maximize the probability of finding novel associations. The main design choices to be made relate to sample sizes and choice of commercially available genotyping chip and are often constrained by cost, which can currently be as much as several million dollars. No comprehensive comparisons of chips based on their power for different sample sizes or for fixed study cost are currently available. We describe in detail a method for simulating large genome-wide association samples that accounts for the complex correlations between SNPs due to LD, and we used this method to assess the power of current genotyping chips. Our results highlight the differences between the chips under a range of plausible scenarios, and we demonstrate how our results can be used to design a study with a budget constraint. We also show how genotype imputation can be used to boost the power of each chip and that this method decreases the differences between the chips. Our simulation method and software for comparing power are being made available so that future association studies can be designed in a principled fashion.