"We saw surprising overlap or predisposition of not just related but also apparently unrelated traits," said Boehnke, who suggested that there could be master regulators in the genome that play a role in many different aspects of physiology and health.

The next step is to take the research beyond GWA, which looks at a few million places on the genome, into genome sequencing. Genome sequencing will allow researchers to assay most of the 3 billion base pairs in the human genome and find less common variants that might be associated with disease. Currently, a three-study international team co-led by the Michigan group is sequencing 2,650 individuals with and without diabetes, in what is one of the largest sequencing projects underway in the world. Scott and Boehnke hope to have information about the variants present in individuals with and without diabetes within the next year-and-a-half.

Source: University of Michigan