Published in
Public Library of Science, PLoS Genetics, 2(6), p. e1000849, 2010
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000849
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- [www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov] | PDF
- [discovery.ucl.ac.uk]
- [hdl.handle.net]
- [doaj.org] | PDF
- [air.unimi.it] | PDF
- [europepmc.org] | PDF
- [www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov] | PDF
- [www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov] | PDF
- [citeseerx.ist.psu.edu] | PDF
- [ts-si.org] | PDF
Tools
Genome-Wide Identification of Susceptibility Alleles for Viral Infections through a Population Genetics Approach
,
Rachele Cagliani,
Giacomo P. Comi ,
Nereo Bresolin,
Mario Clerici ,
Manuela Sironi
Full text: Download
Abstract
Viruses have exerted a constant and potent selective pressure on human genes throughout evolution. We utilized the marks left by selection on allele frequency to identify viral infection-associated allelic variants. Virus diversity (the number of different viruses in a geographic region) was used to measure virus-driven selective pressure. Results showed an excess of variants correlated with virus diversity in genes involved in immune response and in the biosynthesis of glycan structures functioning as viral receptors; a significantly higher than expected number of variants was also seen in genes encoding proteins that directly interact with viral components. Genome-wide analyses identified 441 variants significantly associated with virus-diversity; these are more frequently located within gene regions than expected, and they map to 139 human genes. Analysis of functional relationships among genes subjected to virus-driven selective pressure identified a complex network enriched in viral products-interacting proteins. The novel approach to the study of infectious disease epidemiology presented herein may represent an alternative to classic genome-wide association studies and provides a large set of candidate susceptibility variants for viral infections.