Saturday 27 April 2013

genetics - Paralogous genes in genome-wide association studies?

Has anybody tested if paralogous genes are over-represented among the genes identified by genome-wide association studies (GWAS)?



For example, if a GWAS study finds 200 genes associated to the disease/trait, and a number X of those can be classified as belonging to Y different gene families, is there a test to see if X and Y are bigger than expected, given the total number of genes and gene paralogies in a genome? Here I am talking long established copies within a species, not CNVs in different individuals of the same species.



I am thinking there is an interesting question behind this: if a gene has duplicated during the evolution of a genome, and the different gene copies have taken specialized, yet related, roles, an unbiased analysis like GWAS should be able to find cases where different paralogous copies associate to different subdiseases/subtraits within the same global disease/trait.

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