Polygenic Disorders

David E Comings, City of Hope Medical Center, Duarte, California, USA

Published online: January 2006

DOI: 10.1038/npg.els.0005556

The vast majority of common disorders affecting humans are polygenic, due to the additive and interactive effect of multiple genes, each with a small effect, interacting with the environment. Because of their importance and frequency, polygenic disorders have a great economic impact. The identification of the genes involved promises to be significantly more difficult than the identification of the genes involved in single gene disorders.

Keywords: polygenes; linkage disequilibrium; threshold models; microsatellites; single nucleotide polymorphisms; variance

Figure 1. Threshold model of polygenic disorders.
Figure 2. Example of a polygenic system (see text for details).
Figure 3. Types of linkage disequilibrium (LD) (see text for details).
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 References
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Related Sub-Topics:

Molecular Genetics of Common and Complex Disease | Gene Mapping by Disease Association | Gene Expression Profiling of Genetic Disease
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Article Title: Polygenic Disorders
 
How to Cite close
Comings, David E(Jan 2006) Polygenic Disorders. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester. http://www.els.net [doi: 10.1038/npg.els.0005556]