Significant progress has been made in searching for genes responsible for inflammatory bowel disease, it was announced last night.
Researchers in the UK, USA and Belgium have identified gene variants in 18 regions of the genome linked to the disease, they announced in Nature.
There are about 600 genes that have been regarded as "suspects" of involvement in the disease up to now.
The researchers said they were "zooming in on the genetic culprits."
The research involved the genomes of nearly 70,000 people and a range of statistical techniques. It was undertaken at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK, at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, and at the University of Liège, Belgium.
Researcher Dr Jeffrey Barrett, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK, said: "We have taken the biggest ever data set for IBD and applied careful statistics to narrow down to the individual genetic variants involved. Now we have a clearer picture of which genes do and do not play a role in the disease.
"We are zooming in on the genetic culprits of IBD."
Fellow researcher Dr Hailiang Huang, from the Massachusetts General Hospital and Broad Institute said: "An issue with studying complex diseases is that it can be hard to move from genetic associations, usually including many genetic variants of similar evidence, to knowing exactly which variants are involved. We need to be careful in deciding when we are sure we have the right variant.
"This new technique helps us to pinpoint which genetic variants are implicated in IBD with greater confidence."
Hailiang Huang et al. Fine-mapping inflammatory bowel disease loci to single variant resolution. Nature 29 June 2017; doi: 10.1038/nature22969
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