Genes influence most diseases, researchers report
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A core assumption in the study of disease-causing genes has been that they are clustered in molecular pathways directly connected to the disease. But work by a group of researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine suggests otherwise
The gene activity of cells is so broadly networked that virtually any gene can influence disease, the researchers found. As a result, most of the heritability of diseases is due not to a handful of core genes, but to tiny contributions from vast numbers of peripheral genes that function outside disease pathways.
Any given trait, it seems, is not controlled by a small set of genes. Instead, nearly every gene in the genome influences everything about us. The effects may be tiny, but they add up.
Jonathan Pritchard, PhD, Professor of Genetics and Biology, is the senior author, and graduate student Evan Boyle and postdoctoral scholar Yang Li, PhD, share lead authorship. Their work is described in a paper published in Cell.
The researchers call their provocative new understanding of disease genes an “omnigenic model” to indicate that almost any gene can influence diseases and other complex traits. In any cell, there might be 50 to 100 core genes with direct effects on a given trait, as well as easily another 10,000 peripheral genes that are expressed in the same cell with indirect effects on that trait, said Pritchard, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
Each of the peripheral genes has a small effect on the trait. But because those thousands of genes outnumber the core genes by orders of magnitude, most of the genetic variation related to diseases and other traits comes from the thousands of peripheral genes. So, ironically, the genes whose impact on disease is most indirect and small end up being responsible for most of the inheritance patterns of the disease.
Pritchard’s omnigenic model promises to take basic biology in new directions and means biologists need to think a lot more about the structure of networks that link together those thousands of peripheral disease genes.