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Bacterial genomics: Microbial GWAS coming of age

Nature Microbiology volume 1, Article number: 16059 (2016) Cite this article

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A linear-mixed modelling genome-wide association approach for detecting genes and genetic variants underlying antibiotic resistance in bacterial pathogens heralds a new era for microbial genome-wide association studies.

Will genome-wide association studies (GWAS) finally become a core part of bacteriology? When I gave a talk with the title ‘Genome wide association studies in bacteria?’ at a human genetics meeting in 2006, my host was unable to believe that I had deliberately put a question mark at the end of the title. Although the first successful human genetics genome-wide association study was only published in 2005, this had been preceded by a decade of intense technological effort focused on making the approach feasible1 and many researchers believed, correctly, that it would become central to human genetics. There are now thousands of published human GWAS but only a handful of studies applying the technique to bacteria.The study of Earle et al.2 published in this issue of Nature Microbiology represents an important milestone towards finally removing the question mark and realizing the potential of bacterial GWAS (ref. 3).

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Figure 1: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are performed according to similar principles in humans (left) and bacteria (right) but controlling for the possible confounding effects of genomic relatedness (here shown using a phylogenetic tree) is particularly important in bacterial GWAS.

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  1. Daniel Falush is at the Institute of Life Science-1, Room 121, Swansea University, College of Medicine, Swansea, SA2 8PP, UK.,

    Daniel Falush

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  1. Daniel Falush
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Correspondence to Daniel Falush.

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Falush, D. Bacterial genomics: Microbial GWAS coming of age. Nat Microbiol 1, 16059 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.59

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.59

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