According to new research, it looks like individual genetic knowledge of the mother and father are important when it comes to genetically inherited diseases. The following is from a long and rather detailed article by Justin Petrone in the January 5, 2009 edition of Genomeweb.com.
A recent paper published in Nature by Decode Genetics discussed the discovery of a version of a common SNP correlated with susceptibility to type 2 diabetes.
According to the team, which also included British researchers, the impact of the T2D variant, located on chromosome 11, depends on descent: If the SNP is inherited from the father, the risk of developing type 2 diabetes increases by 30 percent, but if it is inherited maternally, the risk is 10 percent lower compared to the version of the variant that is not associated with the SNP.
The finding highlights the importance of taking parental origin into account when conducting genome-wide association studies, and could provide an approach for doing in other studies based on Illumina microarrays, genealogical data, and statistical tools that Decode has developed, according to the firm.
The issue of what role path-of-descent plays in interpreting GWAS findings has been discussed both in scientific literature and at recent conferences…
While researchers are aware of the potential role parent-of-origin plays, many simply do not have access to such data for the sample sets they wish to interrogate.
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Taking parent-of-origin into account “requires significant data and know-how to do so, capabilities that most research institutions simply do not have at present,” Stefansson said. “One has to have genotypic information not only on a large number of individuals, but also, by definition, to be able to determine which genotypes were inherited through the maternal and paternal lineages. This requires either deep cohorts or the ability to impute the missing data.”
