Genetic modifiers of asthma susceptibility and severity: analysis of most robustly associated genes and the influence of the ancestral background

Asthma is a complex trait influenced by genetic and environmental factors, having high prevalence in the Spanish population. In our project, we aimed to determine whether common variants from 16 candidate genes previously involved in the disease constituted susceptibility/severity factors for asthma in the Spanish population. For that, we analyzed a few hundreds of informative markers of common variation in these genes, as well as a set of 93 independent polymorphisms to adjust for population stratification in unrelated cases and controls, the latter provided by the BNADN. Now, we would like to re-analyze the data generated for the control population, representing diverse Spanish localities, in order to explore the genetic structure in the region. This is part of a larger study in relation to susceptibility to this and other complex diseases (e.g. melanoma, sepsis, pulmonary fibrosis, ARDS) that are being studied in our laboratory. With that, we will be able to find to which extent the geographical variation found for the risk alleles is due to the underlying population structure or to other evolutionary processes.