DARRYL LEJA, NHGRIGenomic data from more than 400 individuals has been combined with information on genetic activity within multiple tissues from these donors to produce a detailed catalog of the associations between human genotypes and tissue-specific gene expressions. Reports from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) Consortium published in Nature today (October 11) describe the procurement and analysis of this extensive dataset, which is now freely available to researchers.
“It’s really wonderful to see these papers,” Jeffrey Barrett, a geneticist at the U.K.’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute who was not involved with the research, writes in an email to The Scientist. “They represent the most important resource for gene expression across tissues available right now.”
“The scale of the study is impressive,” adds human geneticist Michelle Ward of the University of Chicago who also did not participate in the work. “Using 44 tissues from 449 individuals, they’ve looked at gene expression [data] and seen how they associate with 12.5 million DNA sites that are known to vary between individuals.” The result, she says, “is the most comprehensive catalog of the associations between genetic variation and gene expression to date.”
The GTEx project was launched ...
