Identifying the network of biochemical interactions that underpin disease pathophysiology is a key hurdle in drug discovery.
Genome-wide association analysis offers the opportunity to identify the genomic regions and mutations which underpin disease phenotypes and production traits.
Implicit in this last shift was a greater focus on the health systems that underpin disease programmes.
Ascertaining which of these are functional, against a background of neutral SNVs, promises to improve our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underpinning disease and complex traits.
Banking of human tissue is an important tool for advancing translational research, allowing the study of genes, RNA and proteins to explore the biological mechanisms that underpin disease aetiology and biology, and the development of novel treatments [ 2].
The latter is particularly interesting as it is not limited to or biased towards existing knowledge, and holds the potential to reveal truly novel regulatory mechanisms underlying the dynamic molecular processes underpinning disease[ 8].
Another challenge is how best to integrate ecological drivers with sociological processes underpinning disease transmission in vulnerable communities, an area only now beginning to be examined (Lindsay and Birley 1996; Lindsay and Martens 1998; Patz et al. 1996).
Aberrant kinase function is implicated in a range of diseases including cancer, and mechanistic studies of kinase activation are important to build an understanding of the molecular processes that underpin disease and to facilitate the discovery of small-molecule kinase inhibitors.
While here the use of multiple loci in a GRS was advantageous in the context of risk stratification, we acknowledge that such an approach may not be as beneficial if the objective is to identify and isolate functional mechanisms/pathways underpinning disease risk.
The specific and sensitive diagnosis of gastrointestinal nematode infections of livestock underpins effective disease control, which is highly relevant now that anthelmintic resistance (AR) is a major problem.
