GVHD meets GWAS

GWAS Meets TCGA to Illuminate Mechanisms of Cancer Predisposition

Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have unraveled a large number of cancer risk alleles. Understanding how these allelic variants predispose to disease is a major bottleneck confronting translational application. In this issue, Li and colleagues combine GWASs with The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) to disambiguate the contributions of germline and somatic variants to tumorigenic gene expressio...

Gwas

That’s interesting. Care to elaborate? Part of the problem in trying to make a movie about real animals is that they aren’t actors. You can write a script — and there was one — but the chimps didn’t always follow it! So, like a good field worker, one had to adapt as the film footage came in and the story line changed. In this day and age of global warming, disease pandemics, and the like, it’s ...

[Post-transfusion GVHD].

The Japanese Red Cross Society has appointed representatives to Blood Centers nationwide to collect information on blood transfusion-associated adverse reactions, and data on 310 suspected cases of post-transfusion GVHD were collected during the 8-year period from 1993 to 2000. A diagnosis of posttransfusion GVHD was made in 61 cases based on the demonstrated presence of donor lymphocytes in th...

Rare cells predict GVHD.

Digesting GWAS

nce upon a time, medical genetics was a relaOtively straightforward business: one gene—one protein—one disease was sufficient to explain most inherited disease and was neatly in keeping with Gregor Mendel’s discovery of alleles with his famous peas. The concept remains a good starting point but the biology of life is somewhat more complex, and increasingly we have become impressed and perplexed...