Following on the heels of the results of the Welcome Trust Case-Control Consortium are two papers reporting associations between risk of coronary heart disease/heart attack and an allele on chromosome 9. Like many of the signals coming out of these recent genome-wide studies, the polymorphism implicated is not in a gene, and no functional effect is immediately obvious; this will take a while to sort out.

This is another promising result, though. The nay-sayers who argued against the HapMap and whole-genome association are finding themselves proved very wrong. As is often the case in science, the Luddite position was not tenable-- technology opens all sorts of doors for biology, and a paper from 1996 (which was for essentially science fiction at the time) has proved quite prescient.

Labels: Association, Genetics