EurekAlert! -- Genetic variants in a region on chromosome 9q may influence asthma development in Mexican children, according to research published in the August 28 issue of the open-access journal PLoS Genetics. Researchers from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Institute of Public Health (Mexico) and their collaborators at universities in the US and the UK* conducted a genome-wide association (GWA) study, in which they looked at over 500,000 variants across the genome in 492 Mexican children with asthma and their parents to identify novel genes that may influence asthma development. The work points to the chromosome 9q21.31 region as a novel candidate region for childhood asthma.
