Omics in Neurodegenerative Disease: Hope or Hype?

Omics in Neurodegenerative Disease: Hope or Hype?
Trends Genet. 2020 Jan 10;:
Authors: Diaz-Ortiz ME, Chen-Plotkin AS
Abstract
The past 15 years have seen a boom in the use and integration of 'omic' approaches (limited here to genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic techniques) to study neurodegenerative disease in an unprecedented way. We first highlight advances in and the limitations of using such approaches in the neurodegenerative disease literature, with a focus on Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). We next discuss how these studies can advance human health in the form of generating leads for downstream mechanistic investigation or yielding polygenic risk scores (PRSs) for prognostication. However, we argue that these approaches constitute a new form of molecular description, analogous to clinical or pathological description, that alone does not hold the key to solving these complex diseases.
PMID: 31932096 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Source: Trends in Genetics : TIG - January 9, 2020 Category: Genetics & Stem Cells Authors: Diaz-Ortiz ME, Chen-Plotkin AS Tags: Trends Genet Source Type: research