Human genetic disorderslinking mendelian and complex diseases

Abstract

From Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”, many years elapsed before human diseases were considered in an evolutionary framework. Besides theoretical and empirical advances, we are far from the complete understanding of disease aetiology. Highly penetrant disorders with Mendelian inheritance are mostly explained by the mutation-selection balance model, which is insufficient to describe the selective pressures acting on the full set of alleles related to diseases. We show in the first two papers that Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies provide a unique opportunity to investigate variation and contribute to the understanding of the genetic architecture of disease. Besides exploring the role of rare and copy number variants in Parkinson’s disease (PD), we demonstrate the functional relation between Mendelian and idiopathic PD. In the last paper, we report that variation in genes previously related to Mendelian disorders has a more important role in driving complex disease susceptibility than genes associated only to complex diseases.