Drug-dependence disorders (we focus here on cocaine, opioid, and nicotine dependence) are genetically influenced. Risk genes have been located based primarily on genetic linkage studies, and identified primarily based on genetic association studies. In this article we review salient results from linkage, association, and genome-wide association study methodologies, and discuss future prospects ...

Multiple mechanisms such as genetic and epigenetic variations within a key gene may play a role in malarial susceptibility and response to anti-malarial drugs in the population. ABCB1 is one of the well-studied membrane transporter genes that code for the P-glycoprotein (an efflux protein) and whose effect on malaria disease predisposition and susceptibility to drugs remains to be understood. W...

BACKGROUND Genome wide association studies are now widely used in the livestock sector to estimate the association among single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) distributed across the whole genome and one or more trait. As computational power increases, the use of machine learning techniques to analyze large genome wide datasets becomes possible. METHODS The objective of this study was to iden...

Whole genome sequencing (WGS) remains prohibitively expensive, which has encouraged the development of methods to impute WGS data into nonsequenced individuals using a framework of single nucleotide polymorphisms genotyped for genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Although successful methods have been developed for cohorts of unrelated individuals, current imputation methods in related indivi...

Genetic association studies in admixed populations are under-represented in the genomics literature, with a key concern for researchers being the adequate control of spurious associations due to population structure. Linear mixed models (LMMs) are well suited for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) because they account for both population stratification and cryptic relatedness and achieve in...

When planning resequencing studies for complex diseases, previous association and linkage studies can constrain the range of plausible genetic models for a given locus. Here, we explore the combinations of causal risk allele frequency (RAFC ) and genotype relative risk (GRRC ) consistent with no or limited evidence for affected sibling pair (ASP) linkage and strong evidence for case-control ass...

Introduction Histone N-termini (tails) undergo diverse post-translational modifications, including acetylation, phosphorylation, methylation, ubiquitination and ADPribosylation (van Holde, 1988; Wolffe, 1998). The discoveries of enzymes that perform these modifications and of chromatin-associated proteins that selectively bind to position-specific histone modifications (Strahl and Allis, 2000; ...

Small interfering RNA (siRNA) is an essential factor for epigenetic modification of the genome. Recent studies have suggested that endogenous siRNAs induce DNA methylation, chromatin modification and chromatin inactivation at homologous sequences. We have shown that siRNAs targeted to promoter regions of endogenous rice genes induce strong DNA methylation of the targeted sequences, but transcri...

In the past decade, the scientific and medical community has witnessed dramatic progress in epigenetics and has begun to understand some of the epigenetic mechanisms that contribute to human disease, particularly cancer. In January 2007, the third biannual workshop on Clinical Translation of Epigenetics in Cancer Therapeutics was held in Phoenix, Arizona. Its mission was to discuss the basic ep...

Tens of thousands of genetic association studies investigating the influence of common polymorphisms on disease susceptibility have been published to date. These include ∼1,000 genome-wide association studies (GWAS). This vast amount of data in the field of complex genetics is becoming increasingly difficult to follow and interpret. It can be expected that the situation will become even more co...