title: Characterization of autosomal copy-number variation in African Americans: the HyperGEN Study.
abstract: African Americans are a genetically diverse population with a high burden of many, common heritable diseases. However, our understanding of genetic variation in African Americans is substandard because of a lack of published population-based genetic studies. We report the distribution of copy-number variation (CNV) in African Americans collected as part of the Hypertension Genetic Epidemiology Network (HyperGEN) using the Affymetrix 6.0 array and the CNV calling algorithms Birdsuite and PennCNV. We present population estimates of CNV from 446 unrelated African-American subjects randomly selected from the 451 families collected within HyperGEN. Although the majority of CNVs discovered were individually rare, we found the frequency of CNVs to be collectively high. We identified a total of 11 070 CNVs greater than 10 kb passing quality control criteria that were called by both algorithms - leading to an average of 24.8 CNVs per person covering 2214 kb (median). We identified 1541 unique copy-number variable regions, 309 of which did not overlap with the Database of Genomic Variants. These results provide further insight into the distribution of CNV in African Americans.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biostatistics, Section on Statistical Genetics, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294, USA. nwineing@uab.edu
authors.forename: Nathan E
authors.initials: NE
authors.lastname: Wineinger
authors.forename: Nicholas M
authors.initials: NM
authors.lastname: Pajewski
authors.forename: Richard E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Kennedy
authors.forename: Mary K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Wojczynski
authors.forename: Laura K
authors.initials: LK
authors.lastname: Vaughan
authors.forename: Steven C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Hunt
authors.forename: C Charles
authors.initials: CC
authors.lastname: Gu
authors.forename: Dabeeru C
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Rao
authors.forename: Rachel
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lorier
authors.forename: Ulrich
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Broeckel
authors.forename: Donna K
authors.initials: DK
authors.lastname: Arnett
authors.forename: Hemant K
authors.initials: HK
authors.lastname: Tiwari
mesh_terms: D001741:Black or African American / Q000235:genetics*; D056915:DNA Copy Number Variations; D005828:Genetics, Population; D055106:Genome-Wide Association Study; D006801:Humans; D008957:Models, Genetic; D015233:Models, Statistical