Efforts to fine map the causal variants responsible for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) signals have been largely predicated on the common disease common variant theory, postulating a common variant as the culprit for observed associations. This has led to extensive resequencing efforts that have been largely unsuccessful [1]–[5]. Here, we explore the possibility that part of the reason for this may be that the disease class causing an observed association may consist of multiple low-frequency variants across large regions of the genome—a phenomenon we call synthetic association. For convenience, these less common variants will be referred to here as “rare,” but we emphasize that we use this term loosely, only to refer to variants less common than those routinely studied in GWAS.
