Many disease-susceptible SNPs exhibit significant disparity in ancestral and derived allele frequencies across worldwide populations. While previous studies have examined population differentiation of alleles at specific SNPs, global ethnic patterns of ensembles of disease risk alleles across human diseases are unexamined. To examine these patterns, we manually curated ethnic disease association data from 5,065 papers on human genetic studies...

Most GWASs were performed using study populations with Caucasian ethnicity or ancestry, and findings from one ethnic subpopulation might not always translate to another. We curated 4,573 genetic studies on 763 human diseases and identified 3,461 disease-susceptible SNPs with genome-wide significance; only 10% of these had been validated in at least two different ethnic populations. SNPs for autoimmune diseases demonstrated the lowest percentage...

Expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL), or genetic variants associated with changes in gene expression, have the potential to assist in interpreting results of genome-wide association studies (GWAS). eQTLs also have varying degrees of tissue specificity. By correlating the statistical significance of eQTLs mapped in various tissue types to their odds ratios reported in a large GWAS by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (WTCCC), we...

Lam HYK, Clark MJ, Chen R, Chen R, Natsoulis G, O’Huallachain M, Dewey F, Habegger L, Ashley EA, Gerstein MB, Butte AJ, Ji H, Snyder M. Comparison of two genome sequencing platforms. Nat Biotechnol. 2011 Dec 18;30(1):78-82.

Cardiovascular diseases are among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in the developed world despite advances in cardiac care over the last few decades. Although most of these advances in cardiovascular medicine have been made through trials of therapies on a population scale, the success of such therapies in a patient often is dependent on particular aspects of each individual. In this review, we present the evidence for the impact...

The degree of progressive chronic histological damage is associated with long-term renal allograft survival. In order to identify promising molecular targets for timely intervention, we examined renal allograft protocol and indication biopsies from 120 low-risk pediatric and adolescent recipients by whole-genome microarray expression profiling. In data-driven analysis, we found a highly regulated pattern of adaptive and innate immune gene...