title: The future of model organisms in human disease research.
abstract: Model organisms have played a huge part in the history of studies of human genetic disease, both in identifying disease genes and characterizing their normal and abnormal functions. But is the importance of model organisms diminishing? The direct discovery of disease genes and variants in humans has been revolutionized, first by genome-wide association studies and now by whole-genome sequencing. Not only is it now much easier to directly identify potential disease genes in humans, but the genetic architecture that is being revealed in many cases is hard to replicate in model organisms. Furthermore, disease modelling can be done with increasing effectiveness using human cells. Where does this leave non-human models of disease?
authors.affiliation: Medical Research Council Clinical Sciences Centre, Imperial College, London, UK. t.aitman@csc.mrc.ac.uk
authors.forename: Timothy J
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Aitman
authors.forename: Charles
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Boone
authors.forename: Gary A
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Churchill
authors.forename: Michael O
authors.initials: MO
authors.lastname: Hengartner
authors.forename: Trudy F C
authors.initials: TF
authors.lastname: Mackay
authors.forename: Derek L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Stemple
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002874:Chromosome Mapping; D056726:Genetic Association Studies / Q000639:trends*; D015894:Genome, Human; D006801:Humans; D023421:Models, Animal; D008954:Models, Biological; D020641:Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA