Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder primarily affecting motor function. The disease is typically first diagnosed after age 50, although it can also occur in younger individuals (the actor Michael J. Fox being a well-known example). In an effort to identify genetic variants that affect the age at onset for Parkinson’s disease, researchers at the Wadsworth Center genotyped 431 individuals with Parkinson’s disease at a number of genetic location.
A single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) is a genetic location at which diversity exists in the human population: for example, most people have a “T” at a given location while others have a “C”. The “C” in this example would be referred to as a minor allele. The SNP columns in the data set record the number of minor alleles in each person’s genome at the given position (humans have two copies of their genome, so this number can be 0, 1, or 2).
Onset: Age at onset of Parkinson’s diseaseSNP_X: Number of minor alleles at the location of SNP_XThis is a small, de-identified subset of data from:
Hill-Burns EM, Ross OA, Wissemann WT, Soto-Ortolaza AI, Zareparsi S, Siuda J, Lynch T, Wszolek ZK, Silburn PA, Mellick GD, Ritz B, Scherzer CR, Zabetian CP, Factor SA, Breheny PJ and Payami H (2016). Identification of genetic modifiers of age-at-onset for familial Parkinson’s disease. Human Molecular Genetics, 25: 3849–3862.