Candidate gene–environment interactions: Table 1
Year: 2010
Type: editorial
Abstract: One of the limitations of interdisciplinarity is the misunderstanding regarding specific words and concepts from one discipline to the other (1). One way to circumvent this aspect is to incorporate the vocabulary of other disciplines, when it corresponds to the appropriate concept. Gene environment interaction is a popular topic, for which there has been to date,more reviews than established findings. There has been numerous attempts to represent what types of interactions could occur (2). Geneticists have proposed the term candidate genes to infer there was a specific hypothesis, usually regarding the function of the gene, justifying its study for a given disease, whereas genomewide comparisons have been called "agnostic " (3), which etymologically means without knowledge. In that context, testing a candidate gene-environment interaction is to test a hypothesis, based on knowledge (4). It can be done basically two ways (table 1). The first is to study gene(s) in relation to a known environmental factor, such as coal dust (5), occupational allergens, farming or smoking. In the case of smoking for example, we will be interested in genes playing a role in the antioxidant defence, because of the known oxidant role of constituents of tobacco smoke. For farming, because of the general hypotheses related to microbial agents frequently
Authors: Francine Kauffmann, Rachel Nadif
Institutions: Inserm, Université Paris-Sud
Language: English
Subfield: Genetics
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2054669959