The 163 papers included in this supplement to BMC Genetics are a subset of the 183 contributions presented at GAW14. All of these papers have been reviewed for scientific merit. The proceedings begin with two papers describing the two datasets, followed by the 163 individual GAW14 contributions organized by presentation group and alphabetically by first author within each group. In addition to the individual papers in this volume, each presentation group has a summary in a forthcoming supplement to the journal Genetic Epidemiology in which the present manuscripts are compared and contrasted and the important themes and results from each group are described. Novel methods for linkage and association analyses using SNPs and microsatellites were developed, compared to existing methods, and applied to the GAW data, resulting in many interesting conclusions concerning appropriate approaches to the analysis of these sorts of data and also concerning areas of methodological development that are currently needed in this field.
