By integrating gene-expression and protein interaction data for 13 diverse complex diseases, an international team led by investigators at the Linköping University Hospital in Sweden shows in a paper published online in advance in Genome Biology that modules of highly interconnected complex disease genes are enriched for disease-associated SNPs. The authors add that those polymorphisms "could be used to find novel genes for functional studies."
In another paper published online in advance, an international team led by scientists at the University of Oxford reports its use of whole-genome sequencing data from 13 classical laboratory and four wild-derived mouse inbred strains to produce "a comprehensive catalogue of 103,798 polymorphic TE [transposable element-derived] variants." Then, applying that dataset to characterize TE variants across the mouse lineage, the team found evidence to suggest "that the majority of TE variants are introduced though the male germline and that only a minority of TE variants exert detectable changes in gene expression," as it writes in Genome Biology. "However, among genes with differential expression across the strains there are twice as many TE variants identified as being putative causal variants than expected," the team adds.