Problems in interpreting and using GWAS of conditional phenotypes illustrated by 'alcohol GWAS'

Gwas

That’s interesting. Care to elaborate? Part of the problem in trying to make a movie about real animals is that they aren’t actors. You can write a script — and there was one — but the chimps didn’t always follow it! So, like a good field worker, one had to adapt as the film footage came in and the story line changed. In this day and age of global warming, disease pandemics, and the like, it’s ...

Digesting GWAS

nce upon a time, medical genetics was a relaOtively straightforward business: one gene—one protein—one disease was sufficient to explain most inherited disease and was neatly in keeping with Gregor Mendel’s discovery of alleles with his famous peas. The concept remains a good starting point but the biology of life is somewhat more complex, and increasingly we have become impressed and perplexed...

Explaining microbial phenotypes on a genomic scale: GWAS for microbes

There is an increasing availability of complete or draft genome sequences for microbial organisms. These data form a potentially valuable resource for genotype-phenotype association and gene function prediction, provided that phenotypes are consistently annotated for all the sequenced strains. In this review, we address the requirements for successful gene-trait matching. We outline a basic pro...

GWAS in lung disease.

We read with interest the recent article ‘Genome-wide association studies in lung disease’ by Artigas et al. While we agree that a greater understanding of the biological pathways underlying disease development and progression (susceptibility) will be a major outcome from these genetic epidemiological studies, we suggest other benefits may also stem from this research. The genetics of chronic o...

Principles of GWAS