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Casting a wider net for diabetes susceptibility genes

Nature Genetics volume 40, pages 1039–1040 (2008)Cite this article

Recent successes in identifying loci involved in predisposition to type 2 diabetes have been driven by genome-wide association studies in populations of European descent. A new discovery, using samples of East Asian origin, of diabetes susceptibility variants mapping to the KCNQ1 gene highlights the importance of extending these studies to a wider range of populations.

The identification of several new diabetes susceptibility loci through genome-wide association (GWA) analysis has demonstrated the power of this approach. The number of loci robustly implicated in the development of type 2 diabetes (T2D) has climbed from just 3 in 2006 to almost 20 today1,2. To date, these studies have almost exclusively featured populations of European descent. Two papers on pages 1092 and 1098 of the current issue3,4 provide the first description of T2D GWA scans conducted in East Asian populations, and illustrate clearly the value of extending large-scale discovery efforts to populations of non-European origin.

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Figure 1: Power to detect variants of similar effect size but differing risk-allele frequency.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mark I. McCarthy is at the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism, the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, and the Oxford National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre, Oxford, UK. mark.mccarthy@drl.ox.ac.uk,

    Mark I McCarthy

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McCarthy, M. Casting a wider net for diabetes susceptibility genes. Nat Genet 40, 1039–1040 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng0908-1039

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