THE DETECTION OF LINKAGE

Abstract

Fully efficient methods for the detection of genetic linkage in human population are now available even for data which consist of sibships only. Though the computational time required is considerable, the great increase in precision of the results repays the additional labor involved in using this technique instead of that of paired sibs. Data from two recently published collections of family material illustrate this conclusion in showing the sib-pair method to utilize in one case only 70% and in three other cases only about 20% of the information given by the efficient technique. Theoretical investigation shows that even when no parental descriptions are available the sib-pair technique can only be expected to be about 50% efficient and that this figure is much reduced when records of the parental generation can be used.