Association analysis of mild mental impairment using DNA pooling to screen 432 brain-expressed single-nucleotide polymorphisms

We hypothesize that mild mental impairment (MMI) represents the low extreme of the same quantitative trait loci (QTLs) that operate throughout the distribution of intelligence. To detect QTLs of small effect size, we employed a direct association strategy by genotyping 432 presumably functional nonsynonymous single-nucleotide polymorphisms (nsSNPs) identified from public databases on DNA pools of 288 cases and 1025 controls. In total, 288 MMI cases were identified by in-home administration of McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities to 836 twin pairs selected from a community sample of more than 14 000 children previously screened for nonverbal cognitive delay using parentally administered tests. Controls were selected from the community sample representing the full range of nonverbal intelligence. SNPs showing at least 7% allele frequency differences between case and control DNA pools were tested for their association with the full range of nonverbal intelligence using five DNA subpools, each representing quintiles of the normal quantitative trait scores from the 1025 controls. SNPs showing linear associations in the expected direction across quintiles using pooled DNA were individually genotyped for the 288 cases and 1025 controls and analyzed using standard statistical methods. One SNP (rs1136141) in HSPA8 met these criteria, yielding a significant ( P = 0.036) allelic frequency difference between cases and controls for individual genotyping and a significant ( P = 0.013) correlation within the control group that accounts for 0.5% of the variance. The present SNP strategy combined with DNA pooling and large samples represents a step towards identifying QTLs of small effect size associated with complex traits in the postgenomic era when all functional polymorphisms will be known.