Gene--environment-wide association studies: emerging approaches
- PMID: 20212493
- PMCID: PMC2891422
- DOI: 10.1038/nrg2764
Gene--environment-wide association studies: emerging approaches
Abstract
Despite the yield of recent genome-wide association (GWA) studies, the identified variants explain only a small proportion of the heritability of most complex diseases. This unexplained heritability could be partly due to gene--environment (G×E) interactions or more complex pathways involving multiple genes and exposures. This Review provides a tutorial on the available epidemiological designs and statistical analysis approaches for studying specific G×E interactions and choosing the most appropriate methods. I discuss the approaches that are being developed for studying entire pathways and available techniques for mining interactions in GWA data. I also explore methods for marrying hypothesis-driven pathway-based approaches with 'agnostic' GWA studies.
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Comment in
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Gene-by-environment experiments: a new approach to finding the missing heritability.Nat Rev Genet. 2011 Nov 18;12(12):881; author reply 881. doi: 10.1038/nrg2764-c1. Nat Rev Genet. 2011. PMID: 22094952 No abstract available.
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