The basic idea of how synthetic associations emerge in this model is illustrated in Figure 1, which shows how rare variants, by chance, can occur disproportionately in some parts of a gene genealogy. Any variant “higher up in the genealogy” that partitions those parts of the genealogy containing more disease variants than average will be identified as disease-associated. It is well appreciated that a noncausal variant will show association with a causal variant if the two are in strong linkage disequilibrium (LD). We use the previously introduced term synthetic association [6], however, to describe how such indirect association can occur between a common variant and at least one and possibly many rarer causal variants. Using the term synthetic as opposed to indirect emphasizes that the properties of the association signal are very different when the responsible variant or variants are much less frequent than the marker that carries the signal, as we detail below.
