GIM’s new publishing partner!

You’ll notice changes this month to Genetics in Medicine, the foremost shift being that we are now being published by Nature Publishing Group (NPG). The selection of NPG by the College was a long and involved process given that a great many publishers vied to be the new home for GIM. In the end, the board of the ACMG felt that NPG was the best publisher for the College’s official journal given NPG’s small size and its intense focus on quality, two attributes that also apply to the ACMG.

We look forward to a productive relationship with NPG; we share a tangible sense of excitement about the direction that genetics and genomics is taking as our field becomes increasingly critical to the practice of medicine. We will continue to do our best to bring to both the genetics and the broader medical community word of the most significant and exciting advances in our field.

The genetics of dengue fever

Dengue fever is a particularly dreadful infectious disease and, after malaria, the most common mosquito-borne infection in the world. The symptoms of dengue can vary from a mild flu-like illness to a lethal disorder characterized by extremely high fever and increased vascular permeability. What determines whether an individual develops the mild or severe form of the disease has thus far been largely a mystery, although epidemiologic studies have suggested a role for underlying genetic factors. Now, researchers have begun to dissect the underlying genetics of this disorder. A genome-wide association study comparing almost 5,000 controls with more than 1,700 infected individuals identified two polymorphisms that appear to predispose to the severe form of dengue infection. One polymorphism, in the MICB gene, appears to play a role in immune response; the other gene implicated, PLCE1, may be involved in vascular permeability, a major clinical feature of severe dengue fever. The work, published recently in Nature Genetics (2011;43:1139–1141), was carried out by a multinational team of researchers from Singapore, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom.