Peter Visscher has an essay in Genetics, Human Complex Trait Genetics in the 21st Century. I believe it’s open access, so I encourage you to read it. It strikes me that he’s conflating genetics with all of biology when he states that “Genomics will become synonymous with biology.” But that’s my main area of skepticism. Visscher’s influence is in part due to the fact that he leverages a background in quantitative genetics with genomics. If there is anything I think Visscher will be remembered for, I suspect it’s his association with the revolution triggered by GCTA. Many complex traits which seemed intractable are now coming down to earth. The ground is changing underneath us, and the public and even many biologists don’t feel the tremors.
Here some important selections form Visscher’s piece:
With gigantic sample sizes, it will be possible to explain most, if not all, additive genetic variation for a range of traits and to tackle old questions about the nature of mutational variance, the maintenance of genetic variation, the genetic control of variability, and the elusive quantification of variation due to nonadditive and genotype-by-environment (G × E) interactions.
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Model organisms such as fruit flies, mice, and worms have been at the forefront of major discoveries in genetics over the last century. Many if not most of these discoveries were about mechanisms, e.g., mechanisms of natural selection, speciation, recombination, imprinting, response to selection, and gene function. Experimental organisms have been less successful in modeling human disease (in the sense of leading to successful prevention or treatment), even, for example, when engineered mutations in mice are identical to those discovered in human patients. My prediction for future research into human disease causes and drug discovery is that humans will become a “model organism” through exploiting new technologies such as tissue-specific cell lines and gene editing.\
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One major application of studying complex traits in humans is in medicine. Indeed, most of the public funding to study complex traits in human populations has come from medical research funding bodies such as the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, and the Medical Research Council. Genetic technologies, including genome sequencing, have already led to changes in clinical practice, for example by personalizing drug advice for cancer depending on the tumor’s genomes. I believe the very near future will see this extended to diagnosis of Mendelian disease and to providing more refined personalized treatment advice for cancer.
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