Association screening of common and rare genetic variants by penalized regression

Motivation: This article extends our recent research on penalized estimation methods in genome-wide association studies to the realm of rare variants. Results: The new strategy is tested on both simulated and real data. Our findings on breast cancer data replicate previous results and shed light on variant effects within genes. Availability: Rare variant discovery by group penalized regression is now implemented in the free program Mendel at http://www.genetics.ucla.edu/software/ Contact: huazhou@ucla.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.