Here They Are, All Together

In BMC Medical Genetics, NIH researchers Andrew Johnson and Christopher O'Donnell report that they created an open-access, centralized database of 56,411 significant SNP-phenotype associations from 118 GWAS studies. From re-annotating the reported results, they found that two-thirds of the SNPs are located near a protein-coding gene and that cell-adhesion genes are over-represented from GWAS studies, suggesting that new insight can be made by querying a database. "The creation of an open access resource for GWAS results should encourage and facilitate new genetic and genomic analysis, and provides a potential resource for easier participation in results sharing among interested researchers," the authors write.