A systems approach to the classification of genes impacting the cardiovascular phenome

最近的研究非常成功地确定了与心脏病、肥胖和糖尿病等常见疾病有关的遗传因素。大多数发现都是基于基因与单一疾病或特征的关联，这对人与人之间差异很大的基因很有效。我们的建议是通过使用多种特征来识别与特定疾病有关的基因组，从而识别出人与人之间差异较小的一些基因。通过同时寻找多个特征的模式，我们的目标是识别已知疾病基因中的疾病指纹，并利用这些指纹发现新的疾病基因。新发现的基因将包括药物开发和诊断测试的潜在候选基因。

Recent research has been very successful in identifying genetic factors involved in common diseases like heart disease, obesity and diabetes. The majority of findings are based on the association of a gene with a single disease or characteristic, which works well for genes that are very variable between people. Our proposal is to identify some of the genes that are less variable between people, by using multiple characteristics to identify groups of genes that are involved in particular diseases. By looking for patterns in several characteristics at the same time we aim to identify disease fingerprints in known disease genes, and use those fingerprints to find new disease genes. The newly identified genes will include potential candidates for drug development and diagnostic tests.