ParaHaplo 2.0: a program package for haplotype-estimation and haplotype-based whole-genome association study using parallel computing.
BACKGROUND
The use of haplotype-based association tests can improve the power of genome-wide association studies. Since the observed genotypes are unordered pairs of alleles, haplotype phase must be inferred. However, estimating haplotype phase is time consuming. When millions of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are analyzed in genome-wide association study, faster methods for haplotype estimation are required.


METHODS
We developed a program package for parallel computation of haplotype estimation. Our program package, ParaHaplo 2.0, is intended for use in workstation clusters using the Intel Message Passing Interface (MPI). We compared the performance of our algorithm to that of the regular permutation test on both Japanese in Tokyo, Japan and Han Chinese in Beijing, China of the HapMap dataset.


RESULTS
Parallel version of ParaHaplo 2.0 can estimate haplotypes 100 times faster than a non-parallel version of the ParaHaplo.


CONCLUSIONS
ParaHaplo 2.0 is an invaluable tool for conducting haplotype-based genome-wide association studies (GWAS). The need for fast haplotype estimation using parallel computing will become increasingly important as the data sizes of such projects continue to increase. The executable binaries and program sources of ParaHaplo are available at the following address: http://en.sourceforge.jp/projects/parallelgwas/releases/
Misawa
Kazuharu
K
Research Program for Computational Science, Research and Development Group for Next-Generation Integrated Living Matter Simulation, and Fusion of Data and Analysis Research and Development Team, RIKEN, 4-6-1 Shirokane-dai, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-8639, Japan. kazumisawa@riken.jp.
Kamatani
Naoyuki
N