Searching for missing heritability: Designing rare variant association studies

Genetic studies have revealed thousands of loci predisposing to hundreds of human diseases and traits, revealing important biological pathways and defining novel therapeutic hypotheses. However, the genes discovered to date typically explain less than half of the apparent heritability. Because efforts have largely focused on common genetic variants, one hypothesis is that much of the missing heritability is due to rare genetic variants. Studies of common variants are typically referred to as genomewide association studies, whereas studies of rare variants are often simply called sequencing studies. Because they are actually closely related, we use the terms common variant association study (CVAS) and rare…