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International Textbook of Diabetes Mellitus, 4th Ed., Excerpt #141: The Genetics of Type 2 Diabetes Part 3

Identification of T2DM affecting genetic variants: The methods used to map disease-causing variation have evolved rapidly in the last decades thanks to technical advances in genotyping methods. Originally, disease-causing loci were identified primarily by linkage analysis, utilizing the long stretches of linkage in affected families. By genotyping 400–500 genetic markers, disease loci can be mapped on a genome-wide level without any prior hypothesis about which genes are involved. Finding that affected family members share a certain marker that is identical by descent (i.e., identical because it was inherited from the same parent) more often than expected by chance is evidence that a disease-causing variant is in linkage with that marker. This strategy has been very successful in mapping genetic diseases like MODY that have a strong penetrance and a known mode of inheritance.

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