Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Asthma is a common but complex heritable disease that is caused by genetic and environmental factors, and one of the most common chronic conditions in childhood. Several studies have been performed to identify the genetic cause of asthma; yet despite the success of these studies, we are still unable to account for the heritability of asthma. A probable explanation for this gap is genomic imprinting. Each of us inherits two copies of our genes, one from the mother and one from the father. Usually both copies of each gene are active in cells. However, there are certain genes whose activity depends on the parent of origin: some genes are normally active only when they are inherited from the father, others are active only when inherited from the mother. This phenomenon is called 'genomic imprinting' ('parent-of-origin effect'). Imprinting occurs in early life during growth and development of the fetus. In my proposed research, I hypothesize that imprinting is involved in the origins of asthma. I will study this hypothesis by looking at data obtained in three genomic studies from Canada (The Canadian Asthma Primary Prevention Study, The Study of Asthma Genes and the Environment, The Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean Québec Familial Collection) and one from the Netherlands (The Dutch Asthma Study). The data coming from these studies include the genomes of both parents and their children. The aim of my research is to use statistical analysis of the four existing family-based studies to identify candidate regions for imprinting. To date, I have studied the parent-of-origin effect separately in each of the four family-based studies and combined the results with respect to a meta-analysis.