What is meant by minor allele frequency and why is it important to consider for genotyping studies?
The minor allele frequency (MAF) refers to the frequency at which the less common allele of the SNP occurs in a given population. The lower the minor allele frequency selected, the greater the number of tagSNPs that will be required to represent the variation in a given genomic region. SNPs with a minor allele frequency of 5% or greater were targeted by the HapMap project, so that figure is default in QuickSNP.
