Identifying regulatory relationships among genomic loci, biological pathways, and disease

摘要

ObjectiveElucidating genetic factors of complex diseases is one of the most important challenges in biomedical research. Recently, a genetical genomics approach of mapping genotype to transcripts has been used in complex disease analysis. This approach treats messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) expression as a quantitative trait and identifies putative regulatory loci for the expression of an individual gene. However, the single-gene approach could not detect single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP's) associated with the concerted activity of multiple genes. Since complex diseases result from the interactions of multiple genes, it is important to consider associations between genotype and multiple gene expression.