Progress and promise in understanding the genetic basis of common diseases.

ABSTRACT: Susceptibility to common human diseases is influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. The explosive growth of genetic data, and the knowledge that it is generating, are transforming our biological understanding of these diseases. In this review, we describe the technological and analytical advances that have enabled genome-wide association studies to be successful in identifying a large number of genetic variants robustly associated with common disease. We examine the biological insights that these genetic associations are beginning to produce, from functional mechanisms involving individual genes to biological pathways linking associated genes, and the identification of functional annotations, some of which are cell-type-specific, enriched in disease associations. Although most

SUBMITTER: Price AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4707742 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature