Allele Frequency Distortion (AFD), developed at the Yale University School of Medicine and licensed to MSI, is a method for identifying regions of DNA that differ between individuals who have a particular disease and those who do not.

AFD uses DNA samples from mixed populations of individuals and allows the simultaneous identification of all chromosomal regions associated with a disease. We expect that AFD will be able to shorten dramatically the time required to identify disease-related genes. We will focus on common diseases that are known to result from inheritance of several affected genes (polygenic diseases) with an initial concentration on psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, panic disorder, depression, and obsessive compulsive disorder.