The Identification of Interacting Gene -Environmental Factor Pairs

The etiological factors of disease include genetic and environmental factors, and these factors may interact in causing disease. Genetic and environmental factors which are associated with the same diseases are likely candidates for interactions or associations. For example, a genetic factor and an environmental factor that have several diseases in common may be related such that the environmental factor interacts with the gene. We extracted gene-disease and environmental factor-disease associations and computed a similarity score between each gene and environmental factor pair based on shared diseases. For several of the gene-environmental factor pairs, we found evidence for plausible biological relationships in the literature. We postulate that that the remaining gene-environmental factor pairs may have novel interactions.