Two posts you should read
Here’s two posts on Genetic Future that I think you should read:
- The elusive genetics of bipolar disorder — a depressing story about the genome-wide association search for bipolar disorder genes
- Height and hypertension genes in Nature Genetics — a depressing story about the genome-wide association search for height genes
Both posts tell stories of how genome wide association searches are harder than we hoped. A post I’ve linked to before — Why do genome-wide scans fail? — tries to explain why.
I might return to the height stuff later — in our group we have analysed the DeCODE dataset using our multi-locus methods — but I’ll have to leave that for later, ’cause I am late for work now…
April 8th, 2008 at 4:52 am
Have you seen this post on additive genetic variation? Essentially, they’re suggesting that most genetic variance is additive, which then implies that epistasis isn’t as big a problem as feared. I don’t think this is the end of the story, but it’s somewhat comforting.
April 8th, 2008 at 6:05 am
I hadn’t seen that paper, no. Looks interesting! I’ll read it today.
Even if epistasis is not a problem, I’m not sure we should be optimistic, though. It just rules out one place where the genetic effects can hide, but it doesn’t tell us where all that genetic effect is then hiding. It is there, but we do not know where!
Of course, if it just turns out to be rare variants, then increased sample size and re-sequencing should help a lot.