Zeitschrift für genetische Störungen und genetische Berichte

Genetic Networks in Heterogeneous Populations

Mogen Fenger

Genetic Networks in Heterogeneous Populations

The core in biological organisms is the information harbored in the genome, which encode the entire blue-print of functionality and regulation of processes in cells and integration of multicellular organisms. Population genetics aims at identifying genes of importance for biochemical and physiological pathways particularly with scope of revealing genetic causes of diseases. Although the rapidly growth in technology we have experienced recently has given us unprecedented opportunities to perform genetic studies, all the promises may not have been fulfilled entirely as hoped. The reasons are several, but it seems that two issues have been partially neglected, namely that study populations are all heterogenous and genes are not solitary but function in networks.