Research article

My sister's keeper?: genomic research and the identifiability of siblings

Christopher A Cassa^1,2 , Brian Schmidt² , Isaac S Kohane^1,3 and Kenneth D Mandl^1,3

¹Children's Hospital Informatics Program at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Boston, MA, USA

²Clinical Decision Making Group, CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

³Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

author email corresponding author email

BMC Medical Genomics 2008, 1:32doi:10.1186/1755-8794-1-32

Published:	25 July 2008

Abstract

Background

Genomic sequencing of SNPs is increasingly prevalent, though the amount of familial information these data contain has not been quantified.

Methods

We provide a framework for measuring the risk to siblings of a patient's SNP genotype disclosure, and demonstrate that sibling SNP genotypes can be inferred with substantial accuracy.

Results

Extending this inference technique, we determine that a very low number of matches at commonly varying SNPs is sufficient to confirm sib-ship, demonstrating that published sequence data can reliably be used to derive sibling identities. Using HapMap trio data, at SNPs where one child is homozygotic major, with a minor allele frequency ≤ 0.20, (N = 452684, 65.1%) we achieve 91.9% inference accuracy for sibling genotypes.

Conclusion

These findings demonstrate that substantial discrimination and privacy risks arise from use of inferred familial genomic data.