The Australo-Anglo-American Ankylosing Spondylitis Consortium (TASC) has been funded by the NIH and other bodies to perform a genome-wide association study of a large Ankylosing Spondylitis cohort on the Illumina 317K SNP chip. The genotyping for this project has already been completed, and statistical analyses are being finalized. Preliminary analyses have identified several new variants underlying disease risk.

ALSPAC is currently awaiting the imminent arrival of genotype data for 2000 individuals who have been genotyped on the Illumina 317K chip. Inclusion of unselected control individuals can increase power to detect association. I am therefore asking that the committee consider allowing me to pool the ALSPAC genome-wide data with TASC in order to maximize power to detect association in the TASC study. As I will soon be leading the analysis of the genome-wide data in ALSPAC, such a pooling would be trivial to impliment. Additionally, since no phenotype data is required in this proposal, there would be no need for data linkage.