Statistical Approaches for Next-Generation Sequencing Data

de Dandi Qiao

During the last two decades, genotyping technology has advanced rapidly, which enabled the tremendous success of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in the search of disease susceptibility loci (DSLs). However, only a small fraction of the overall predicted heritability can be explained by the DSLs discovered. One possible explanation for this "missing heritability" phenomenon is that many causal variants are rare. The recent development of high-throughput next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology provides the instrument to look closely at these rare variants with precision and efficiency. However, new approaches for both the storage and analysis of sequencing data are in imminent needs.