Why look at genetic association one locus at a time when you can do several loci at a time?

This looks pretty cool. They propose a method of doing association studies by considering several SNPs at once instead of one SNP at a time. Even though this makes biological sense, it seems like the analysis would get messy and cumbersome. They seem to address these issues and analyze their method on previous data sets. They use a "Bayesian inspired" method called: stochastic search maximisation algorithm.
I'll need to read this paper more closely to see exactly how this method compares to previous single-SNP analyses, one of which, they describe in the paper, is on T2D.

Simultaneous Analysis of All SNPs in Genome-Wide and Re-Sequencing Association Studies
Clive J. Hoggart, John C. Whittaker, Maria De Iorio, David J. Balding
PLoS Genetics 4(7)

Abstract: Testing one SNP at a time does not fully realise the potential of genome-wide association studies to identify multiple causal variants, which is a plausible scenario for many complex diseases. We show that simultaneous analysis of the entire set of SNPs from a genome-wide study to identify the subset that best predicts disease outcome is now feasible, thanks to developments in stochastic search methods. We used a Bayesian-inspired penalised maximum likelihood approach in which every SNP can be considered for additive, dominant, and recessive contributions to disease risk. Posterior mode estimates were obtained for regression coefficients that were each assigned a prior with a sharp mode at zero. A non-zero coefficient estimate was interpreted as corresponding to a significant SNP. We investigated two prior distributions and show that the normal-exponential-gamma prior leads to improved SNP selection in comparison with single-SNP tests. We also derived an explicit approximation for type-I error that avoids the need to use permutation procedures. As well as genome-wide analyses, our method is well-suited to fine mapping with very dense SNP sets obtained from re-sequencing and/or imputation. It can accommodate quantitative as well as case-control phenotypes, covariate adjustment, and can be extended to search for interactions. Here, we demonstrate the power and empirical type-I error of our approach using simulated case-control data sets of up to 500 K SNPs, a real genome-wide data set of 300 K SNPs, and a sequence-based dataset, each of which can be analysed in a few hours on a desktop workstation.