In a paper published online today in the journal Nature, a team of deCODE scientists detail a major mechanism through which genetic factors contribute to major public health problems.

In its work on the inherited components of dozens of common diseases, deCODE has discovered gene variants that significantly affect individual susceptibility or protection against disease. In the common forms of these conditions - such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases - deCODE has previously shown that genetic variants confer increased or decreased risk by up-regulating or down-regulating the activity of major biological pathways.

In today’s paper, the deCODE team and collaborators from Merck demonstrate one of the principal ways in which the activity of biological pathways is functionally perturbed in a quintessentially complex condition: obesity.

Kari Stefansson, CEO of deCODE, put the study into context: “One of the observations we have made in our work on the isolation of disease genes is that the genetic risk of common diseases is often conferred by variations in the sequence of the genome that affect expression of genes. Hence, one of the ways to approach the study of common diseases is through the analysis of gene expression. This paper provides a substantial contribution towards the understanding of gene expression in man and one example of how it can be used to expand our knowledge of one disease, namely obesity.”