Architecture. Even though we often write about novel gene findings in the epilepsies, we assume that most epilepsies are complex genetic or polygenic. Polygenic inheritance suggests the genetic architecture is composed of multiple interacting genetic risk factors, each contributing a small proportion to the disease risk. However, when using the phrase genetic architecture, sometimes I am not quite sure what I actually mean by this. For example, how many genes are needed? This is why I wanted to build a model genetic architecture and explore what happens if we build a genetic disease solely from rare risk variants. Follow me to a brief back-of-the-envelope calculation of how this might work.
Tag Archives: complex genetic disorders
Rare variants and olive trees
Epic dimensions. 5,000 years ago, human civilization was getting off the ground in Mesopotamia. At some point, the early human pioneers decided to use pictures as letters and human writing was invented. Ox became aleph, which became alpha, which turned into literature, which finally turned into blogging. At around the same time that the Mesopotamian people invented the direct precursor of modern day tweets and text messages, rare genetic variants started spreading through the human population. In fact, all the rare variation that we see in humans today, had probably not been present prior to the chiseling of the first human words. Continue reading
