Identifying Interacting Environmental Factor - Gene Pairs

摘要

Most diseases are caused by a combination of environmental and genetic etiological factors, and these factors may interact in causing disease. We conjectured that an environmental factor and a gene that are associated with the same set of diseases are likely to interact. We extracted environmental factor - disease associations and gene - disease associations from freely accessible online databases and the research literature, and identified environmental factor - gene pairs that were similar in being associated with a common set of diseases. For several of these pairs that we examined, we found evidence for plausible biological interactions in the literature. We postulate that that the remaining pairs may represent novel interactions between an environmental factor and a gene.