Thursday, September 19, 2013

Human SNP Links Differential Outcomes in Inflammatory and Infectious Disease to a FOXO3-Regulated Pathway


Linked below is an interesting publication regarding an allele that is associated with greater susceptibility of suffering a disease.  The concepts of this paper are (slightly) relevant to my project this year.  Here, they are looking at existing GWAS data to gain insight into the role of genetics on complex diseases and conditions.  What they found was that having a certain version of an allele (generated by a single SNP in the gene FOXO3A) can cause a human to have a much greater susceptibility to the disease.  The minor allele (“G”) is associated inflammatory diseases such as Crohns disease and rheumatoid arthritis.  On a molecular level, minor allele carriage was shown to limit inflammatory responses by reducing certain cytokines.  Overall, variability in prognosis is quite common in complex diseases, and this paper helps us to understand further a the link between genotype and phenotype of a disease.

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