What Genome-wide Association Studies Can Do for Medicine

Abstract

As researchers have explored the environmental and inherited causes of common diseases, they have often amassed clinical and laboratory data collected from people with common complex disorders. Many have also collected biologic material, including DNA. These resources represent an essential component for ferreting out genes relevant to disease with the use of the genome-wide association study. This method entails the matching of a given human genome sequence with an annotated, high-resolution map of common genetic variation; it benefits from a large collection of DNA samples obtained from a population whose clinical characteristics are well defined, as well as cost-effective genotyping . . .