Figure 3.
A global bias for maternal genetic effects in the etiology of OFCs. In every comparison using different subtypes of orofacial clefts and ethnicities (All: all ethnic groups, Eur: Europeans and Asn: Asians), we observed that the number of maternal-specific signals equals or exceeds the number of paternal-specific signals. A significant excess (P<0.05) of maternal-specific signals is observed in three categories, as indicated. Bar plots show the number of independent loci (LD blocks) with P<1 × 10−4 identified using the MAT (gray) and PAT (black) tests. A similar excess of maternal associations was also observed using a more stringent significance threshold of P<10−5, although due to the smaller number of loci, these differences did not reach statistical significance (data not shown).