Understanding gene interactions holds key to personalized medicine, scientists say

When the Human Genome Project was completed, in 2003, it opened the door to a radically new idea of health—that of personalized medicine, in which disease risk and appropriate treatment would be gleaned from one's genetic makeup. As more people had their genomes sequenced, disease-related genes would start coming into view— and while this is true in many ways, things also turned out to be much more complicated. Sixteen years on, tens of thousands of people have had their genomes sequenced yet it remains a major challenge to infer future health from genome information. Part of the reason may be that genes interact with each other to modify trait inheritance in ways that aren't totally clear, write Donnelly Centre researchers in an invited perspective for the leading biomedical journal Cell.