Exploring Population Concepts in Multiethnic Gene-Environment Interaction Studies

描述(由申请人提供)：建议的项目探索新的和不断增长的基因-环境相互作用(GxE)研究领域的研究人员如何操作“人类群体”的概念。拟议的项目将增加关于传统流行病学家和遗传流行病学家如何利用不同类型的数据合作，使群体在其疾病生物医学研究中发挥作用的关键信息。我们这一阶段的研究将调查研究人员在a)当环境变量被整合到遗传学研究中时的群体设计，以及b)当研究中心将样本与遗传学或环境暴露的“相似性”汇集在一起时所面临的挑战和复杂性。该项目将审查GxE研究产生的分析和结果的社会和伦理层面。这一点尤其重要，因为这些GxE研究旨在将遗传数据与环境变量相结合，这些变量可能与种族和民族等社会文化类别有关，包括饮食和生活方式。将被研究的GxE研究网站拥有大约7万人环境暴露的纵向信息，这些人大多是代表性不足的种族和民族背景，最近还增加了DNA和组织材料。GxE变量、不同的人群和庞大的队列规模的组合使他们的储存库成为美国最受欢迎的GxE研究样本之一。拟议研究的研究方法主要包括对这些实验室的工作过程进行人种学观察、与科学家进行访谈和文件分析。该项目将提供更广泛的经验信息基础，科学界、生物伦理学家和政策制定者可以从中了解使用不同的框架对生物医学中的人群进行分组和定义的潜在影响。它的发现将有助于科学家在未来的研究中认识和深思熟虑他们对人口概念的使用。 公共卫生相关性：拟议的项目将调查人口概念在人类遗传流行病学研究中基因-环境相互作用研究中的概念化和可操作性。该项目将分析研究人员在将基因组数据与环境因素信息进行比较以了解基因与环境相互作用时所面临的实践和问题。面临的一些挑战涉及分析使用不同类别收集的汇集数据。拟议项目的目的是提供关于生物医学中人口的不同用途和概念的信息和分析，这将有助于提高与公共卫生相关的基因-环境相互作用研究的可靠性和相关性，适用于不同的个人和群体。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed project explores how researchers in the new and growing arena of gene- environment interaction (GxE) research operationalize the concept of "a human population." The proposed project will add critical information about how traditional epidemiologists and genetic epidemiologists, using different kinds of data, work together to operationalize groups in their biomedical studies of disease. This phase of our research will investigate the challenges and complexities faced by researchers during a) the design of populations when environmental variables are integrated into genetics studies, and b) when research centers pool samples along "similarities" in genetics or environmental exposures. The project will examine the social and ethical dimensions of analyses and results generated by GxE research. This is particularly important as these GxE studies aim to integrate genetic data with environmental variables that may be connected to socio-cultural categories like race and ethnicity, including diet and lifestyle. The GxE research sites to be studied have longitudinal information on environmental exposures from about 70,000 individuals of mostly under-represented racial and ethnic backgrounds, and have recently added DNA and tissue materials. This combination of GxE variables, diverse populations, and the large size of the cohort makes their repository one of the most desirable in the US for samples for GxE studies. The research methodology for the proposed study involves primarily ethnographic observation of work processes in these laboratories, interviews with scientists, and documentary analyses. This project will provide a broader base of empirical information from which the scientific community, bioethicists and policy makers can understand the potential impact of using different frameworks for grouping people and defining populations in biomedicine. Its findings will be useful to scientists in efforts to recognize and deliberate about their usage of concepts of population in future studies. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The proposed project will investigate the conceptualization and operationalization of concepts of population in studies of gene-environment interactions in human genetic epidemiology research. The project will analyze the practices and problems faced by researchers as they work to compare genomic data with information on environmental factors to understand gene-environment interactions. Some of the challenges faced involve analyzing pooled data collected using different categories. The aim of the proposed project is to provide information and analyses about different uses and notions of population in biomedicine, which will be useful for improving the reliability and relevance of public health-related gene-environment interaction studies for different individuals and groups.