Challenges and Opportunities in Understanding Genetics of Fungal Diseases: Towards a Functional Genomics Approach.

🤖 Plain-English Summary

Infectious diseases are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, and human pathogens have long been recognized as one of the main sources of evolutionary pressure, resulting in a high variable genetic background in immune-related genes. Finally, we show how a systems genomics approach can overcome those limitations and can lead to efficient prioritization and identification of genes and pathways with a critical role in susceptibility to fungal diseases.

🔑 Key Findings

• The study of the genetic contribution to infectious diseases has undergone tremendous advances over the last decades.
• Here, focusing on genetic predisposition to fungal diseases, we provide an overview of the available approaches for studying human genetic susceptibility to infections, reviewing current methodological and practical limitations.
• We describe how the classical methods available, such as family-based studies and candidate gene studies, have contributed to the discovery of crucial susceptibility factors for fungal infections.

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