The era of genome-wide association studies: opportunities and challenges for asthma genetics.
In the era of genome-wide association (GWA) studies, delineating pathogenic asthma genetic pathways has provided both challenges and opportunities. Initial GWA studies on asthma and asthma-like phenotypes provided some successes in terms of ascertaining new potential asthma candidate genes. However, due to asthma having a heterogeneous etiology, replications of these genotype-phenotype association studies are generally lacking. Furthermore, genes by environment interactions are generally not considered when GWA studies are conducted. Therefore, there is a need for extensive collaborations in multi-disciplinary research fields, including different environments and populations, to investigate the functional importance of variations in the human genome in relation to asthma pathogenesis.
Zhang
Guicheng
G
Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, School of Paediatrics and Child Health, The University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia, Australia.
Goldblatt
Jack
J
LeSouëf
Peter
P
D001249:Asthma / Q000235:genetics* / Q000473:pathology; D020022:Genetic Predisposition to Disease; D055106:Genome-Wide Association Study / Q000379:methods*; D005838:Genotype; D006801:Humans; D010641:Phenotype; D015203:Reproducibility of Results