Recent advances in genetics
Thursday, April 27th, 2006Two key papers that demonstrated the power of whole-genome association study. It’s a way of figuring out which gene variant caused an illness by scanning the entire genome of multiple individuals with the disease and compare the genome pattern with multiple individuals who don’t have the illness. For example a variant near the gene HNF-alpha was identified to appear more times in individuals with Type II Diabetes.
More recent advances allowed us to be able to scan the entire genome in a hypothesis-free and a priori fashion. Two papers one by Klein et al, 2005 on Age related Macular Degeneration (Science 15 April 2005 308: 385-389) and the other one on Obesity (Herbert et al Science 14 April 2006 312: 279-283). Both studies used a technology that would enable one to simultaneously investigate 100,000 places in the genome where one person may differ from another person.
Welcome to the future folks.
