New approach to genetic analysis yields markers linked to complex diseases
Many diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, and schizophrenia, tend to be passed down through families. After researchers sequenced the human genome about 15 years ago, they had high hopes that this trove of information would reveal the genes that underlie these strongly heritable diseases. However, around 2010, scientists began to realize that this wasn’t panning out. For one, there just weren’t enough patients: In order to unearth a statistically significant genetic marker, researchers would need groups of patients much larger than what they had been able to assemble so far. Furthermore, many of the variants that these studies turned up were found outside the regions of DNA that encode proteins, making it much more difficult to figure out how they might cause disease. A new study from MIT addresses both of those problems. By combining information on gene-disease associations with maps of chemical modifications known as epigenomic marks, which control what genes...