Understanding Human Variation in Infectious Disease Susceptibility through Clinical and Cellular GWAS

Over the last ten years, advances in genotyping and high-throughput sequencing technologies have resulted in an explosion of genetic information. Whereas prior attempts at discovering human genetic differences affecting susceptibility to disease relied on genotyping one or a handful of candidate genetic variants, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have now become a common means of searching for susceptibility genes in an unbiased way. These studies have highlighted the relevance of particular pathways in pathogenesis of infectious and autoimmune disease. Thus, GWAS of clinical phenotypes can alert host-pathogen researchers to unexpected links between their pathway of study and human disease. Complementary to this, cellular GWAS using pathogens as probes can reveal how genetic variation affects cellular processes important for disease pathogenesis.