Vishal Saxena
Background: Autism is a complex disorder characterized by the involvement of multiple loci in the genome and genes. Our newly described methodology, Linkage ordered Gene Sets finds pathways important in complex diseases using genomic distances. We wanted to test whether such a derivation is biased because of the distribution of the underlying microsatellite loci. Further, we also describe in this paper the detailed design underpinning LoGS.
Method: We derived a metric that tests whether the distribution of immune function genes (our primary finding in autism via LoGS) in the genome is biased in terms of the underlying microsatellite distribution. We also describe the design and working of LoGS.
Results: Our results show that there is no bias for immune function either in the 29 loci that were used in our LoGS analysis as well as 30 randomly drawn loci repeated 1000 times.
Conclusion: LoGS is a powerful methodology to probe the mechanisms underlying complex disorders. Our prior findings in autism are not emanating from any bias in the analysis introduced by LoGS.