What can the Finnish population tell us about genetic diseases?

Karen Jones PhD, Market Development, Thermo Fisher Scientific

From the Ice Age, settlers have come in waves to Finland from a small number of founders. The population suffered several bottlenecks. The result is a population that has a lower level of heterogeneity with higher incidences of certain Mendelian and complex diseases compared to the general population, whilst possessing some alleles with protective effects in other diseases.

This presents geneticists with the opportunity to spot otherwise rare disease-causing and disease protective alleles using smaller sample sizes than traditional Genome Wide Association Studies,because they show up with higher frequency in the Finnish population.

Professor Samuli Ripatti, Professor of Biometry at the University of Helsinki and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, US discusses how his group are finding important new genetic loci that contribute to breast cancer, asthma and other diseases. These research findings will open up the door to new treatments and diagnostic markers in the future.

Download the slide presentation to see the group’s microarray genotyping approach in the Finnish population in more detail.