Final Report Summary - 2-HIT (Genetic interaction networks: From C. elegans to human disease)
Our research is focussed on understanding phenotypic variation in individuals. In work funded by the ERC Starting Grant we used integrated gene networks to predict how mutations in different genes combine to cause phenotypic change, we developed a method to study the impact of genetic variation on gene expression dynamics during development, we demonstrated the ability to make useful phenotypic predictions from individual genome sequences in yeast, we found that the rate of somatic mutation varies substantially across the human genome and that synonymous mutations frequently contribute to cancer, and we showed that inter-individual phenotypic variation in genetically identical individuals can derive from variation in gene expression early in development or following environmental challenges.