Reconstruction of genealogical relationships with applications to Phase III of HapMap

Sofia Kyriazopoulou-Panagiotopoulou, Dorna Kashef Haghighi, Sarah J. Aerni, Andreas Sundquist, Sivan Bercovici, Serafim Batzoglou

Abstract: : Accurate inference of genealogical relationships between pairs of individuals is paramount in association studies, forensics and evolutionary analyses of wildlife populations. Current methods for relationship inference consider only a small set of close relationships and have limited to no power to distinguish between relationships with the same number of meioses separating the individuals under consideration (e.g. aunt–niece versus niece–aunt or first cousins versus great aunt–niece).