Abstract
The analysis of the influence of genetic variation on regulation of gene expression at a near-genome-wide level has become the focus of much recent interest. It is widely appreciated that many genes are expressed in a tissue-specific manner and that others are more ubiquitously expressed but relatively little is known about how genetic variation might influence these tissue patterns of gene expression. In this review we discuss what is known about the tissue specificity of the influence of genetic variation and review the challenges that we face in combining hugely parallel, microarray-based gene analysis with equally expensive genetic analysis. We conclude that the available data suggest that genetic variation is essentially tissue specific in its effects upon gene expression and this has important implications for experimental analysis.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by an ARC Discovery Grant to PFRL. CJC was supported by the UNSW/BABS Genome Informatics Scholarship, RBHW by a Peter Doherty Fellowship from NHMRC Australia, and EC and MC by Australian Postgraduate Awards.
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Cotsapas, C.J., Williams, R.B., Pulvers, J.N. et al. Genetic dissection of gene regulation in multiple mouse tissues. Mamm Genome 17, 490–495 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00335-005-0186-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00335-005-0186-9