Quality Control for Genome-Wide Association Studies

This chapter overviews the quality control (QC) issues for SNP-based genotyping methods used in genome-wide association studies. The main metrics for evaluating the quality of the genotypes are discussed followed by a worked out example of QC pipeline starting with raw data and finishing with a fully filtered dataset ready for downstream analysis. The emphasis is on automation of data storage, filtering, and manipulation to ensure data integrity throughput the process and on how to extract a global summary from these high dimensional datasets to allow better-informed downstream analytical decisions. All examples will be run using the R statistical programming language followed by a practical example using a fully automated QC pipeline for the Illumina platform.