Asthma is a complex heritable inflammatory disorder of the airways associated with clinical signs of atopy and bronchial hyperresponsiveness. Recent studies localized a major gene for asthma to chromosome 5q31-q33 in humans. Thus, this segment of the genome represents a candidate region for genes that determine susceptibility to bronchial hyperresponsiveness and atopy in animal models. Homologs...

A high frequency of activating BRAF somatic mutations have been identified recently in malignant melanoma and nevi indicating that BRAF activation could be an early and critical step in the initiation of melanocytic neoplasia. To determine whether BRAF mutations could be an earlier event occurring at the germline level, we screened the entire BRAF coding region for germline mutations in 80 inde...

Gene-environment interactions have the potential to shed light on biological processes leading to disease, identify individuals for whom risk factors are most relevant, and improve the accuracy of epidemiological risk models. We review the progress that has been made in investigating gene-environment interactions in the field of breast cancer. Although several large-scale analyses have been car...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Ischemic stroke (IS) is a multifactorial disorder with strong evidence from twin, family, and animal model studies suggesting a genetic influence on risk and prognosis. Several candidate genes for IS have been proposed, but few have been replicated. We investigated the contribution of 67 candidate genes (369 single nucleotide polymorphisms [SNPs]) on the risk of IS in a N...

UNLABELLED The positional candidate gene approach accelerates the discovery of genes involved in disease. However, the properties of such disease genes are very diverse and the sample size of known disease genes is too small and does not warrant success by the use of a machine-learning approach. A user-defined scoring system may thus help to determine the priority of candidate genes. Spinocereb...

Although it has been widely applied in identification of genes responsible for biomedically, economically, or even evolutionarily important complex and quantitative traits, traditional candidate gene approach is largely limited by its reliance on the priori knowledge about the physiological, biochemical or functional aspects of possible candidates. Such limitation results in a fatal information...

The Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology receives an increasing number of manuscripts reporting tests of associations of candidate genetic polymorphisms with measures of psychopathology in children and adolescents, including tests of gene-environment interactions. These studies represent the exciting new directions that research in child psychopathology is taking. However, the studies also repr...

One of the most exciting new experimental technologies to emerge in recent years has been methods for obtaining genome-wide mRNA expression data using oligonucleotide1 and cDNA microarrays2 (for review, see Cook and Rosenzweig3). Application of gene expression profiling was limited initially by cost, which in turn imposed severe constraints on the number of hybridizations that could be performe...

Genetic screens are powerful methods for the discovery of gene-phenotype associations. However, a systems biology approach to genetics must leverage the massive amount of "omics" data to enhance the power and speed of functional gene discovery in vivo. Thus far, few computational methods for gene function prediction have been rigorously tested for their performance on a genome-wide scale in viv...

background: polycystic ovary syndrome (pcos) is a complex disease having both genetic and environmental components and candidate genes on obesity and insulin metabolism have been hypothesized to be involved in its etiology. objective: we examined the possible association of adiponectin and insulin receptor gene polymorphisms with pcos. materials and methods: a total of 186 women with pcos using...