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The ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ image selected by Pr... |
Article highlights light at end of tunnel in diabetes type 2 gene search
The search for type 2 diabetes genes has been longer and harder than most researchers imagined but there is light at the end of the tunnel – a situation clearly depicted in the June issue of the scientific journal, Diabetologia.
Professor Stephen Lillioja from the Illawarra Health and Medical Research Institute (IHMRI), Health and Behavioural Sciences and Graduate School of Medicine has had his article on diabetes genetics selected as the lead article for the June issue of Diabetologia, the Journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.
An illustration of his choosing as it portrays a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ (pictured above) will be on the cover.
Professor Lillioja’s article identifies specific locations on the genome where a genetic link with diabetes is most likely to be found. He co-authored the article with Dr Alan Wilton from the University of New South Wales.
Professor Lillioja said it has become clear that powerful genome-wide association studies have not supplanted earlier family-based linkage studies which may still point the way to undiscovered diabetes genes.
“Although we have been forced to change our previous assumptions about the genetic basis of type 2 diabetes, the task of finding further key genes is still achievable.
“On the June issue’s cover a distant light signals the hope that this genome journey will have a bright and happy ending -- an outcome that we can begin to glimpse, even though we have not yet arrived,” Professor Lillioja said.
To begin to resolve the genetic component of this disease, Professor Lillioja searched for sites at which genetic results had been corroborated in different studies. This was in the expectation that replication among studies should direct him to the genomic locations of causative genes with more confidence than the results of individual studies.
He mapped the physical location of results from 83 linkage reports for type 2 diabetes and diabetes precursor quantitative traits (such as plasma insulin levels) and recent large Genome Wide Association (GWA) reports for type 2 diabetes on to the same human genome sequence to identify replicated results in diabetes genetic ‘hot spots’.
Results showed that genetic linkage was found at least 10 times at 18 different locations and at least five times in 56 locations. All replication clusters contained study populations from more than one ethnic background and most contained results for both diabetes and pre-diabetes traits.