In a recent Nature Genetics publication, researchers conducted a genome-wide association study on 4,680 people with vitiligo and 39,586 controls to identify genetic variants associated with vitiligo. Vitiligo is a chronic condition in which melanocytes in the skin are destroyed causing white patches to appear on the skin in different parts of the body. The cause of vitiligo is still unknown.
In this study, twenty-three (23) new genes were discovered that increase the risk for vitiligo. The deep genotypic data used to impute, or predict, genetic variants that were not directly tested in these individuals was obtained from 1000 Genomes samples.
For more information on this study, see the publication “Genome-wide association studies of autoimmune vitiligo identify 23 new risk loci and highlight key pathways and regulatory variants” by Jin et al., available in Nature Genetics or in a summary of the study found on the Sci News website.
