Family Markers: Using Multiply-Affected Families to Identify Risk Genes

Published

July 22, 2026

NoteCheck Your Knowledge

  1. What does the DAO gene do?

  2. How did researchers identify DAO and other possible genes linked to bipolar disorder?

NoteNote

You might see a message like Warning: kinship2 package is deprecated for R <= 4.5; switch functionality to Pedixplorer from BioConductor. This is not a problem, and you can still proceed!

NoteCheck Your Knowledge

  1. Why might we want to install add-on packages in R?

  2. How can we confirm that our data loaded correctly? Take a screenshot and point to your evidence.

  3. Looking at the description and contents of the bipolar and depression columns, what do you think the column diagnosis_available represents? Take a screenshot that shows this column.

NoteCheck Your Knowledge

  1. How many generations were assessed in this pedigree? Take a screenshot and label them.

  2. How many male individuals and how many female individuals are present? Take a screenshot and label them.

NoteCheck Your Knowledge

  1. What is the diagnosis for individual 9? Individual 10? Take a screenshot and circle these individuals.

  2. What is the diagnosis for individual 12? Take a screenshot and circle this individual.

NoteCheck Your Knowledge

  1. We already know that DAO is the gene of interest. Why is DAO a better match than IL6 for the diagnosis (based on the pedigree)?

  2. How many copies of the DAO variant do you think are necessary to cause bipolar disorder?

  3. Many individuals are missing diagnoses, genotypes, or both. Why do you think that might be the case?

  4. What could be done to add more certainty to our conclusions? More genotyping, more diagnostics, or more genes collected?