1: Nature. 2007 Feb 22;445(7130):881-5. Epub 2007 Feb 11.Click here to read Links
Comment in:
Nature. 2007 Feb 22;445(7130):828-30.

A genome-wide association study identifies novel risk loci for type 2 diabetes.

Department of Human Genetics, McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre, Montreal H3A 1A4, Canada.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus results from the interaction of environmental factors with a combination of genetic variants, most of which were hitherto unknown. A systematic search for these variants was recently made possible by the development of high-density arrays that permit the genotyping of hundreds of thousands of polymorphisms. We tested 392,935 single-nucleotide polymorphisms in a French case-control cohort. Markers with the most significant difference in genotype frequencies between cases of type 2 diabetes and controls were fast-tracked for testing in a second cohort. This identified four loci containing variants that confer type 2 diabetes risk, in addition to confirming the known association with the TCF7L2 gene. These loci include a non-synonymous polymorphism in the zinc transporter SLC30A8, which is expressed exclusively in insulin-producing beta-cells, and two linkage disequilibrium blocks that contain genes potentially involved in beta-cell development or function (IDE-KIF11-HHEX and EXT2-ALX4). These associations explain a substantial portion of disease risk and constitute proof of principle for the genome-wide approach to the elucidation of complex genetic traits.

PMID: 17293876 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]