The role of genome type-environment interaction and time in understanding the impact of genetic polymorphisms on lipid metabolism

Abstract

Genome type-environment interaction is a poorly understood biological phenomenon, which plays a central role in the etiology of traits that are measures of lipid metabolism. The biological axioms that follow from the inherent complexity of genome type-environment interaction are usually ignored in interpretation of human studies of the associations between genetic variation and interindividual phenotypic variation. The consequence is the inflation of type I and type II errors of inference that may explain the failure to confirm most reported associations. Studies of the variation in patterns of lipid phenotypes over time, which are expressed as responses of genome types to experimentally defined changes in the environment, hold the greatest promise for understanding influences of important environmental interventions such as changes in diet and drug therapy.