Genome-wide association studies in systemic lupus erythematosus: a perspective

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been shown to be a powerful way of identifying novel susceptibility genes in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), as demonstrated by a series of publications in the past year. Lupus has been a late-comer to the GWAS community, being preceded by success stories for the GWAS approach in other autoimmune diseases, including type I diabetes, ankylosing spondylitis, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. The paper by Suarez-Gestal and colleagues seeks to exploit the wealth of data available from a total of four GWAS in SLE, three in European-American populations and one in a Swedish population. The authors describe replication of ten lupus susceptibility alleles in a Spanish SLE case-control study.