June | 2010 | Health & Environment

Limits of genomics – the context for a new “enviromics”?

June 24, 2010 at 10:47 am | Posted in Comment | Leave a comment

"Enviromics": can techniques for determining which parts of the genome are responsible for certain diseases also be applied to environmental influences? (Picture: The first printed edition of the human genome at the Wellcome Collection, London. By Russ London at en.wikipedia.org)

There is an interesting piece in the NYT about how, in the ten years since completion of the human genome, not much seems to have happened in terms of connecting common genetic variants with health outcomes. Researchers are now looking at rare variants instead.

Philosophically, it’s interesting that the move from common variants to rare variants is described by McClellan and King as a “paradigm shift” – normally, the expression is reserved for completely new ways of looking at a problem, the terms of which are more-or-less incompatible with the old approach (the classic example being the move from Newtonian physics to Relativity Theory).

In that context, simply examining uncommon variants rather than common variants in the genome seems much less revolutionary – though that’s not to say it’s not a good idea!

More radical is the “enviromics” concept, published very recently, of applying analytical methods from genomics to human/environment interactions, determining the differences, and mapping these onto health outcomes – to us, it looks not entirely unlike like turbo-charged epidemiology.

Patel, CJ et al. “An Environment-Wide Association study (EWAS) on type 2 diabetes mellitus.” PLoS One. 2010 May 20;5(5):e10746. [full text available]

Patel, CJ & AJ Butte. “Predicting environmental chemical factors associated with disease-related gene expression data.” BMC Med Genomics. 2010 May 6;3(1):17. [e-pub ahead of print]

There is an article on this in the most recent H&E here (see second article).

Blog follow

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 533 other followers
Monthly Subscribe

Each month we produce a news & science roundup and a feature article. Click here to subscribe to our monthly email combining these two.
Featured project
Recent Posts
Latest News and Science
- Study links food-packaging chemical and obesity in girls
  Unhealthy diets and limited physical activity are leading causes of obesity in children, and now new research adds to growing evidence that the chemical BPA found in food packaging may be partly to blame.
- Long-banned chemicals found in pregnant mothers' blood
  This is why it is so important to regulate persistent pollutants.
- Working towards a common goal on risk regulation
  If we all agree on the same end goal when it comes to regulating risk, we need to get better at working together, writes Patrick Thomas. Science should always be the cornerstone of risk assessment, but industry needs to make more of an effort to listen to concerns of different stakeholders.
- MEP calls for parliamentary risk panel to tame green ‘scaremongering’
  The European Parliament needs more science and less emotion in making decisions on chemicals, pesticides and other contentious legislation, an MEP has said, arguing that lawmakers were influenced by "scaremongering" and environmental lobbying in recent votes.
- The mother of all scare stories
  Financial Times: The RCOG’s paper on the ‘potential but unproven’ risks to child health could send a shudder up the spine of a woman.
Blogroll
Health & Environment

Health & Environment is a website and monthly free publication about how environmental contaminants affect human health.
H&E is published by the Cancer Prevention and Education Society.
Analytics by