Tuyển tập các báo cáo nghiên cứu về y học được đăng trên tạp chí y học General Psychiatry cung cấp cho các bạn kiến thức về ngành y đề tài: The value of animal models in predicting genetic susceptibility to complex diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. | Available online http content 11 3 226 Review The value of animal models in predicting genetic susceptibility to complex diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis Emma Ahlqvist1 Malin Hultqvist1 and Rikard Holmdahl1 2 1Medical Inflammation Research Lund University C12 BMC 221 84 Lund Sweden 2Medical Inflammation Research Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics Karolinska Institutet Scheeles vag 2 171 77 Stockholm Sweden These authors contributed equally to this work Corresponding author Rikard Holmdahl Published 19 May 2009 This article is online at http content 11 3 226 2009 BioMed Central Ltd Arthritis Research Therapy 2009 11 226 doi ar2600 Abstract For a long time genetic studies of complex diseases were most successfully conducted in animal models. However the field of genetics is now rapidly evolving and human genetics has also started to produce strong candidate genes for complex diseases. This raises the question of how to continue gene-finding attempts in animals and how to use animal models to enhance our understanding of gene function. In this review we summarize the uses and advantages of animal studies in identification of disease susceptibility genes focusing on rheumatoid arthritis. We are convinced that animal genetics will remain a valuable tool for the identification and investigation of pathways that lead to disease well into the future. Introduction The history of genome-wide mapping of disease-causing genes began in 1980 when linkage analysis by use of anonymous genetic markers was suggested as a method for conducting forward genetics analyses hypothesis-free mapping starting from a trait of interest 1 . This soon led to successful identification of several disease-causing genes often providing the first information on disease mechanisms. In principal there are two approaches to genetic mapping linkage and association analysis reviewed in 2 . Linkage analysis is .
