The results of our simulations can be used to assess the power of a range of possible designs for a given budget and have been encapsulated in a user friendly R package for this purpose (see Software section). Table 2 shows the study size and power that can be achieved on a budget of $2,000,000 for each of the chips assuming the disease causing allele of has a relative risk of 1.5, a risk allele frequency of at least 0.05 and that a p-value threshold of 5×10−7 is used to define power. Since the different chips vary in their prices and their per sample processing costs we obtained quotes from service providers for the various chips and averaged them (see Text S1). The prices were based on quotes for 4000 chips and quotes were converted to US dollars using current exchange rates where necessary. We obtained 5 different quotes for the Affymetrix chips and 6 different quotes for the Illumina chips.
