The increasing interest in infectious disease genetics over the last 5 years reflects several trends in the biomedical sciences, not least the explosion of knowledge in human genomics. However, infectious disease genetics is not a new field; some of the largest twin studies were performed more than 50 years ago, and the first malaria resistance gene was identified soon afterwards. The current excitement reflects a recent increase in power in several of the approaches being used to map and identify the genes responsible for variable susceptibility to many major infectious diseases. Four distinct approaches have been used to identify infectious disease susceptibility and resistance genes; these approaches may now be converging.
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