Genome discoveries

Hot on the heels of the US and Canadian gene findings is another genome-led research article, this time from Belgium. You can read the very technical article online in full at PLoS Genetics. I present the author summary in full here, because the article itself is too complicated for me to summarise:

Individual susceptibility to many common diseases is determined by a combination of environmental and genetic factors. Identifying these genetic risk factors is one of the most important objectives of modern medical genetics, as it paves the way towards personalized medicine and drug target identification. Recent advances in SNP genotyping technology allows systematic association scanning of the entire genome for the detection of novel susceptibility loci. We herein apply this approach to Crohn disease, which afflicts an estimated 0.15% of the people in the developed world and identify a novel susceptibility locus on Chromosome 5. A unique feature of the novel 5p13.1 locus is that it coincides with a 1.25-Mb gene desert. We present evidence that genetic variants at this locus influence the expression levels of the closest gene, PTGER4, located 270 kb away, in the direction of the centromere. PTGER4 encodes the prostaglandin receptor EP4 and is a strong candidate susceptibility gene for Crohn disease as PTGER4 knock-out mice have increased susceptibility to colitis.