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0:00
Good day, everyone.
My name is YY Teo.
I'm currently
at the National University of Singapore.
And I'm the center director
for the Center for Infectious Diseases
Epidemiology Research.
Today, we're going to talk about
"Statistical Genetics of Infectious Diseases".
0:18
Now, there has been quite a lot of progress
in genomics over the past 15 years.
So in 2001, we started with the sequencing
of the first draft of the human genome.
And we did a spectrum
of about 10 years or decade.
We have now moved from
just sequencing one human,
to sequencing thousands of humans
and also not just the humans,
but also the organisms, the pathogens
that are inside and on the surface
of the skins of humans.
Now given this rapid progress,
there has been a lot of opportunities
and challenges
for the use of genomics
to look at a spectrum of diseases.
0:55
So, if we look at the developments
that have happened
from the period of 2005 to 2015,
in these 10 years,
we have moved from a case
where we knew very little
about the genetics or complex traits
and common diseases, to knowing
in excess of 4,000 specific positions
in the human genome
that have been found to be associated
with the severity of a condition
or with the onset of a particular condition.
1:24
Now when we think about infectious diseases,
there has been similarly a lot of discoveries
that have been made.
So for example,
there have been identifications
of particular genetic polymorphisms
that protect or are associated
with malaria in the West Africa,
in the Gambia as well as in Ghana,
which uses data from the Gambia
as an add-on
to improve the statistical power to identify
the loci for severe malaria in Ghana.
Now, this was similarly the case in dengue
where again using
a genome-wide association design,
that we have been identifying
genetic polymorphisms
that confers higher risk,
or conversely a protection effect
against dengue as well as
enteric fever and tuberculosis.
