Genetics and genomics in infectious disease susceptibility

The past decade has witnessed a rapid transition from the first positional cloning of an infectious disease susceptibility gene (Slc11a1, also called Nramp1) in the mouse to genome-wide scans in human multicase families and the identification of potential disease-causing genes by simple inspection of the public human genome databases. Pathogen genome projects have facilitated multilocus sequence typing of pathogen isolates and studies of ecological fitness and virulence patterns in disease-causing isolates. Comparative sequence analysis of pathogen strains and functional genomics studies are now underway, hopefully providing new insight into infectious disease susceptibility.