heritability of diseases tagged posts

Jonathan Pritchard (center) and his colleagues, Yang Li (left) and Evan Boyle, discuss their recent work positing that almost any gene can influence disease. Credit: Steve Fisch

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 o...