SNP

[mahi_007]

Hello,

Im reading a book called:Textbook of Personalized Medicine

As part of the book defines SNP but its written a few obstacles for their use which I do not understand well.

Do you know why these 4 items are considered as the obstacles for the use of it?

I put the part of the book related to SNP:

"Using SNPs or a small set of SNPs is considered to be an excellent tool to discover genes for psychiatric disorders and potentially an excellent tool for psychopharmacogenetics as well.

There are, however, a few obstacles for their use: (1) high-throughput, low-cost genotyping assay systems; (2) definitions of good disease phenotype; (3) a good collaboration effort among geneticists, epidemiologists, and physicians; (4) a good candidate gene(s)".

 

[MonDie]

Well, identifying good candidate genes might be difficult given that scientists still don't know what most of the genome does. Even polypeptides, the building blocks of proteins, don't match the gene perfectly because of the introns that are spliced out of the original RNA transcript (copy) of the gene. Then there are various regulating mechanisms. Transcription factors, which are often proteins themselves encoded elsewhere in the genome, bind to the promoter of the gene and influence how often RNA polymerase binds to that gene to create an RNA transcript. miRNAs will bond with the single-stranded RNA transcript to prevent its translation by a ribosome into a polypeptide.

 

miRNAs https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/MiRNA.svg

Edited November 28, 2015 by MonDie